News

British actor Shirley Anne Field, whose long career included memorable performances in such 1960s classic Angry Young Men genre dramas as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Alfie — as well as a pivotal, several-month stint on the NBC soap Santa Barbara — died Sunday, Dec. 10, of natural causes. She was 87.

Her family announced her passing In a statement to the BBC. “It is with great sadness that we are sharing the news that Shirley Anne Field passed away peacefully on Sunday… surrounded by her family and friends. Shirley Anne will be greatly missed and remembered for her unbreakable spirit and her amazing legacy spanning more than five decades on stage and screen.”

Shirley Anne Field, Albert Finney, ‘Saturday Night And Sunday Morning’ (1960)

Born June 27, 1936, in the Forest Gate district of East London, Field began working as a model in the early 1950, moving into acting by the middle of the decade with...

British actor who starred in the 1960s film classics Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Entertainer

Shirley Anne Field, who has died aged 87, was likened to Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Deneuve and even “a sort of red-haired Brigitte Bardot”. There was no question she could stop traffic. “Lorries used to thunder to a halt, and I would wonder what they were looking at,” she said.

Her presence was sharply distinctive. In Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a defining work of kitchen-sink drama, she was a vision of self-possession as Doreen, who works in a Nottingham hairnet factory, lives with her mother and catches the eye of the discontented lathe operator Arthur Seaton, played by Albert Finney.

Slice-of-life movies focus on character and relationships rather than genre elements or special effects, opting for substance over style. The magic of slice-of-life films lies in their ability to make the mundane feel magical by grounding emotional stories in reality. These films prove that a gripping and powerful story can captivate viewers without relying on typical cinematic elements.

The slice-of-life movies are essentially a depiction of the mundane. They will typically focus on character and relationships over things like genre elements, special effects, or the overall aesthetic. In short, they can be thought of as substance over style. Often presented as naturalistic with, for example, simple camerawork or minimal use of music, the slice-of-life films that work are often remarkable for doing so without relying on so many things that many typical moviegoers would think a film needs in order to be remotely interesting.

While that might make the slice-of-life genre sound dull or boring,...

Lock the doors. Turn on the lights. Check under the bed. Crank up the volume. It’s time for another Halloween Parade!

Please help support the Hollywood Food Coalition.

Click here, and be sure to indicate The Movies That Made Me in the note section so Josh can finally achieve his dream of showing Mandy to his wife!

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Scream Blacula Scream (1973)

Mandy (2018)

Carnival of Souls (1962) – Mary Lambert’s trailer commentary

Night Tide (1961) – Charlie Largent’s Blu-ray review

A Bucket Of Blood (1959) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s DVD review, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Dementia 13 (1963) – Mick Garris’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Region B Blu-ray review, Glenn Erickson’s director’s cut Blu-ray review

The Godfather (1972) – Ernest Dickerson’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairings

The Godfather Part II (1974) – Katt Shea’s trailer commentary

The Conversation (1974) – Josh Olson...

David Olney, the Americana singer and songwriter whose poetic often intricate writing style made an impact on Steve Earle, Townes Van Zandt, and Emmylou Harris, died Saturday from an apparent heart attack following a performance at the 30A Songwriters Festival in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. He was 71. Olney’s publicist confirmed his death.

Born in Rhode Island in 1948, Olney did a stint at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill studying English literature before shuffling through Georgia, where he had an epiphany at a Townes Van Zandt concert. He...

Lionsgate’s “Bombshell,” which opens Dec. 20, has been getting enthusiastic reactions at industry screenings, indicating multiple Oscar nominations are likely. If so, that would make the film a welcome addition to a rare but important Academy Awards category: The hot-button, current events film.

Director Jay Roach, writer Charles Randolph and the actors — including Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie and John Lithgow — deliver the goods in a film that comes out only three years after the 2016 meltdown at Fox News. That puts the film on a par with other multiple-Oscar-nominated films such as the 1976 “All the President’s Men,” which opened three years after the Watergate hearings.

The banner year for this was 1940, when the best-picture nominations included Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” John Ford’s version of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and the Alfred Hitchcock-directed “Foreign Correspondent.” They dealt with, respectively, the grasp of Hitler,...

Albert Finney was not yet 50 when he earned his third Oscar nomination playing a volatile ball of ego and insecurity in Ronald Harwood’s brilliant backstage drama “The Dresser.” At one point, the character — a high-maintenance Shakespearean stage actor slowly collapsing in upon himself like some kind of dying sun — bellows, “I can’t do it anymore! I have nothing more to give!”

That was 35 years ago. His character Sir may have been primed to expire after more than 200 performances as King Lear In “The Dresser,” but Finney, who died Thursday, still had at least half of his career — and two more Oscar nominations — ahead of him: as the epically self-destructive drunk in John Huston’s “Under the Volcano,” and the surly boss-turned-champion in “Erin Brockovich.”

Younger audiences probably know the 82-year-old British actor best as the baritone-voiced mastermind behind the shadowy CIA operations in the first two Jason Bourne sequels,...

Albert Finney in Skyfall

Albert Finney, who shot to fame in 1960 with Saturday Night And Sunday Morning before going on to become of of the stars of the era's kitchen sink dramas and a memorable Poirot, has died at the age of 82, it emerged today. The Salford-born actor won two Baftas, received five Oscar nominations over the course of his career and was also offered a knighthood but chose to turn it down.

Best known in his heyday for works such as Tom Jones, Annie, The Duellists and The Dresser, Finney worked with the Coen brothers in Miller's Crossing, with Tim Burton in Big Fish and Corpse Bride, and with Sidney Lumet in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. He was a hard working, ambitious man whose talent shone through from an early age, enabling him to win a place at Rada where he studied alongside Alan Bates and...

Albert Finney, one of the leading actors of the postwar period, has died after a short illness. He was 82.

The robust British actor began as a stage actor before transitioning to film. With his gravely voice and rumbling stare he brought an intense realism to his work, rising to fame in such 1960s classics as “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” and “Tom Jones.” He later memorably played Agatha Christie’s legendary sleuth Hercule Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express” and impressed critics and audiences with towering performances in “The Dresser” and “Under the Volcano.” Finney was nominated for five Oscars but never won the prize.

In 1963, Finney played the foundling hero in Tony Richardson’s Oscar best picture winner “Tom Jones.” The role made Finney an international movie star and earned him the first of four best actor Oscar nominations. A year earlier, Finney had turned down the title...

Finney died after a short illness, according a family spokesman.

British actor Albert Finney has died aged 82 after a short illness.

In a statement, Finney’s family said that he “passed away peacefully after a short illness with those closest to him by his side.”

Finney began his career in the Royal Shakespeare Company before breaking into film with the lead role in Karel Reisz’s critically acclaimed Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Among his other memorable roles were Tom Jones, as Hercule Poirot in Murder On The Orient Express, The Dresser, Under The Volcano, Erin Brockovich, as Winston Churchill...

'Under the Volcano' screening: John Huston's 'quality' comeback featuring daring Albert Finney tour de force As part of its John Huston film series, the UCLA Film & Television Archive will be presenting the 1984 drama Under the Volcano, starring Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset, and Anthony Andrews, on July 21 at 7:30 p.m. at the Billy Wilder Theater in the Los Angeles suburb of Westwood. Jacqueline Bisset is expected to be in attendance. Huston was 77, and suffering from emphysema for several years, when he returned to Mexico – the setting of both The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Night of the Iguana – to direct 28-year-old newcomer Guy Gallo's adaptation of English poet and novelist Malcolm Lowry's 1947 semi-autobiographical novel Under the Volcano, which until then had reportedly defied the screenwriting abilities of numerous professionals. Appropriately set on the Day of the Dead – 1938 – in the fictitious Mexican town of Quauhnahuac (the fact that it sounds like Cuernavaca...

Seth Holt is an odd figure. An editor at first, his career spans classic Ealing comedies (The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951) and gritty kitchen sink drama (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960), while his overlapping career as producer saw him preside over the classic The Ladykillers (1955). On becoming a director, he worked mainly at Hammer, which made radically different content from Ealing but perhaps shared the same cozy atmosphere.Taste of Fear (a.k.a. Scream of Fear, 1961) is a zestful Diabolique knock-off, while The Nanny (1965) continued Bette Davis' career in horror. It's incredibly strong, beautifully made and quite ruthless: Bette referred to Holt as "a mountain of evil" and found him the most demanding director she'd encountered since William Wyler. During the daft but enjoyably peculiar Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971), Holt developed a persistent case of hiccups that turned the screening of rushes into hilarious occasions. Then he dropped dead of a heart attack,...

Titles include classics such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

UK digital channel Talking Pictures TV has acquired some of the most iconic titles in British film history in two major library deals with ITV Studios Global Entertainment and the Samuel Goldwyn and Woodfall libraries, distributed by Miramax.

Talking Pictures TV, which broadcasts classic British movies on the Freeview and Sky platforms, has secured rights to more than 70 films from the ITV Studios Global Entertainment library and 33 films from the Samuel Goldwyn and Woodfall libraries through Miramax.

The ITV Studios Global Entertainment deal includes Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V; Reach For The Sky; Whistle Down The Wind; In Which We Serve; The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; Hell Drivers; The Bulldog Breed; Séance on a Wet Afternoon; Defence of the Realm and Tarka The Otter.

Among the seminal films included in the Samuel Goldwyn and Woodfall deal are: The Entertainer; Loneliness of the Long...

“Everything But The Kitchen Sink”

By Raymond Benson

In the late 1950s, a film movement emerged in Britain known as “Free Cinema.” Some of the U.K.’s most celebrated filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s were among its practitioners—Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Lorenza Mazzetti, and Tony Richardson. The directors made low budget, short documentaries about the working class with an almost deliberate “non commercial” sensibility. It was radical and exciting, and it was a precursor to the British New Wave that dovetailed with the French New Wave that was so influential on filmmakers everywhere.

Many of the pictures of the British New Wave, released between 1959 and 1964, focused on characters described as “angry young men,” and the films themselves were referred to by critics and theorists as “kitchen sink dramas.” This was because the movies were presented in a harsh, realistic fashion and were indeed about the gritty, working...

Neon Carnival, the annual celebrity-stacked after-hours fair near Coachella thrown by ringmaster Brent Bolthouse at a private airport, returns to Thermal, California on Saturday April 16, TheWrap’s Party Report has learned. Having spent over a decade in desert during Coachella’s opening weekend, the unaffiliated one-night-only affair that lands in the gray area between Saturday night and Sunday morning has seen Clint Eastwood wield a (water) gun for carnival games, Rihanna pull up in her tour bus, Justin Bieber claim an elevated table, and just last year, Leonardo DiCaprio raise his fist in a victory salute 10 months before those digits would finally clasp Oscar gold.

Who needs epics about Ancient Rome, Egypt, or Greek mythology when we have a thousand years of exotic Central and South American civilizations to exploit? Well, it's only been done a handful of times. This cinematic concatenation of nifty architecture, fruity multicolored headgear and athletic oiled warriors is, well, nifty, fruity and athletic!   Kings of the Sun Kl Studio Classics Savant Blu-ray Review 1963 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 108 min. / Street Date May 26, 2015 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95  Starring Yul Brynner, George Chakiris, Shirley Anne Field, Richard Basehart, Brad Dexter, Barry Morse, Armando Silvestre, Leo Gordon, Victoria Vettri, Rudy Solari, Ford Rainey, Chuck Hayward, James Coburn (narrator). Cinematography Joseph MacDonald Film Editor William Reynolds Original Music Elmer Bernstein Written by James R. Webb, Elliot Arnold  Produced by Lewis J. Rachmil Directed by J. Lee Thompson

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Epics don't get wilder than this. According to producer Walter Mirisch, 1963's Kings of the Sun...

UK company acquires Woodfall Library which includes titles such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Tom Jones and A Taste of Honey.

Park Circus has acquired the Woodfall Library of classic British films.

Woodfall was the British production company founded by Tony Richardson, playwright John Osborne and producer Harry Saltzman.

The library includes such revered British films as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Tom Jones, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and A Taste of Honey.

“We will now represent internationally for theatrical licensing the Woodfall Films Library,” said Park Circus exec Jack Bell. “We will be working to make the films available to cinemas and film festivals.”

Most of the titles are expected to be re-released in a new digital format.

“That is one of the key things Park Circus has been behind, making films available digitally. That has allows cinemas to show classic films more. Woodfall Films will be a part of that now.”

Glasgow-based...

I. The Landmine

In August 1955, George Devine, director of London’s Royal Court Theatre, ventured to meet a promising writer, living on a Thames houseboat. “I had to borrow a dinghy… wade out to it and row myself to my new playwright,” he recalled. Thus began a partnership between Devine, who sought to rescue the English stage from stale commercialism, and the 26 year old tyro, John Osborne. Together, they’d revolutionize modern theater.

Born in London but raised in Stoneleigh, Surrey, Osborne lost his father at age 12, resented his low-born mother and was expelled from school for striking a headmaster. While acting for Anthony Creighton’s repertory company, his mercurial temper and violent language appeared. In 1951 he wed actress Pamela Lane, only to divorce six years later. Osborne soon immortalized their marriage: their cramped apartment, with invasive friends and intruding in-laws, John and Pamela’s pet names and verbal abuse,...

Rightly or wrongly, British cinema is often thought of by the masses in two main contexts. The first is the period drama. Lofty accents, grand antique sets, rolling countrysides and costumes that appear tight enough to cut off the actors’ air supply. You know the sort. The kind of movie where you can expect to see Kate Winslet breezing through grand rooms wearing a fancy, frilly dress at any given moment.

The second context is the gritty, kitchen-sink, social-realist drama. These movies base themselves on an authentic feel, harking all the way back to the likes of Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1960, where realism was always first thing on the filmic agenda.

Whilst the British period drama has in recent years found a stronger voice either on television (Downton Abbey) or in collaboration with American cinema, several British “grit-films” have remained true to their source by filming on British turf,...

To categorise an entire country’s cinematic output in a single article is a seemingly impossible task, and one that will likely leave a cavalcade of audiences wondering where their favourite releases are located.

This feature however is designed as a tool to guide and inform viewers who perhaps aren’t as well-versed in the incredible range of motion pictures available worldwide, and to point them in the right direction so they can experience some truly remarkable content; to find a hidden gem.

The country that opened one’s eyes to the unfathomable range, beauty and quality of cinema was our geographically-near cousins France; the filmic culture thrives in amongst the quaint Parisian apartments, the swelling cigarette smoke and the existential conversations shared. Cinema’s rich history really began in France; revolutionary auteurs such as Georges Méliès, the Lumière Brothers and Luis Buñuel paved the way for the plethora of...

Each week HeyUGuys will take a primary focus on the site. This could be a genre of movie, an aspect of the industry, a specific person or part of the movie making process we want to explore further. This week our focus is the divisive issue of film censorship. We began yesterday with a debate of the necessity of the BBFC, and today Beth Webb explains the censorial milestones we have passed. Tomorrow Cai Ross lists the scenes which caused the censors a headache and on Friday we’ll be looking forward to the future of film censorship.

Since 1912 the British Board of Film Censors has been standardising films for its audiences, sifting through the obscene, the violent and the suggestive to ensure that movies receive the classification seen fit. Today, as part of our Film Censorship week, take a look at some of the landmarks in both the British...

Two separate parties were marred by violence Saturday evening and Sunday morning ahead of the Bet Awards.

Violence preceded the 2014 Bet Awards on Saturday night and Sunday morning, with one man stabbed at a party in Hollywood while five others were shot at a party in Los Angeles.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the stabbing occurred around 8:45 p.m. at a Saturday evening event at Hollywood's Lure nightclub, ahead of the awards show. The victim, a man in his 30s, was rushed to a nearby hospital where he is currently in stable condition.

Related Pics: Show-Stopping Bet Award Styles

No information about the suspect in the stabbing case has been released. Approximately eight hours later, a shooting occurred at the Monalizza Restaurant on Vermont Avenue. Five people were shot, one of whom died from their injuries. The shooter has yet to be identified or caught.

According to a statement released by Bet, the pre-show...

Even back when Britain was an industrial nation, films about industry were relatively rare: audiences who worked on assembly lines presumably wanted to look at something more glamorous on their night at the pictures. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Albert Finney snarled, "Don't let the bastards grind you down," a neat encapsulation of the working man's political philosophy, whereas I'm Alright Jack (1959) took a dismayed view of the hostile stand-off between Capital and Labor. That Boulting Brothers satire may have adopted a "plague on both your houses" stance, but in fact its sympathy was with management.

The Agitator (1945) is the product of a gentler age: it tries to be sympathetic to everybody, but again there's a hidden conservative bias. Still, as the product of a generation who had just won the war and were looking forward, some of them, to a bright socialist future of free education and health care,...

Miscasting in films has always been a problem. A producer hires an actor thinking that he or she is perfect for a movie role only to find the opposite is true. Other times a star is hired for his box office draw but ruins an otherwise good movie because he looks completely out of place.

There have been many humdinger miscastings. You only have to laugh at John Wayne’s Genghis Khan (with Mongol moustache and gun-belt) in The Conqueror (1956), giggle at Marlon Brando’s woeful upper class twang as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and cringe at Dick Van Dyke’s misbegotten cockney accent in Mary Poppins (1964). But as hilarious as these miscastings are, producers at the time didn’t think the same way, until after the event. At least they add a bit of camp value to a mediocre or downright awful movie.

In rare cases,...

Fighting, dying, hoping, hating … great sports films are about far more than sport itself. Here Guardian and Observer critics pick their 10 best

• Top 10 superhero movies

• Top 10 westerns

• Top 10 documentaries

• Top 10 movie adaptations

• Top 10 animated movies

• Top 10 silent movies

• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s

10. This Sporting Life

Lindsay Anderson brought to bear on his adaptation of David Storey's first novel, all the poetic-realist instincts he had been honing for the previous decade as a documentarian in the Humphrey Jennings mould. (Anderson had won the 1953 best doc Oscar for Thursday's Children.) Filmed partly in Halifax and Leeds, but mainly in and around Wakefield Trinity Rugby League Club, one of its incidental attractions is its record of a northern, working-class sports culture that would change out of all recognition over the next couple of decades.

The story of Frank Machin, a miner who becomes a star on the rugby field,...

Clio Barnard's The Arbor charted the troubled life of working-class playwright Andrea Dunbar. Her new film, The Selfish Giant, about two boys who scavenge to survive on a Bradford estate, has been called 'a Kes for the 21st century'. Here she talks about the appeal of the margins

Back in 2010, when Clio Barnard was shooting her first feature film, The Arbor, on the Buttershaw estate in Bradford, a young local lad caught her eye. "I first saw him when he was just 14, when I went to Buttershaw to do a workshop at a school," she recalls. "There was just something about him that was different from the other lads I met. He was a bit volatile, but enigmatic too and he really made his presence felt. When I went to Brafferton Arbor [the street on which The Arbor is set] for the first time, there he was, wearing his rigger boots and really dirty clothes. It was pure attitude,...

This week’s UK release of the critically roasted Blood – a new thriller starring Paul Bettany and Stephen Graham (filmed, incidentally, in my home town) and the significantly more well-received Stone Roses documentary Made of Stone directed by Shane Meadows – who is usually known for his rough and realistic portrayals of working-class misery – prompted me to delve back into the archives of tough, raw British cinema. Meadows’ filmography consists of some fine work, most notably the pitch-black revenge thriller Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) and the occasionally brilliant coming-of-age drama This Is England (2006), and Paul Bettany has a history of playing volatile Cockney gangsters (see Gangster No.1 (2000) for his most harrowing depiction of a common man inducted into a life of crime). But these coldly convincing vignettes of blue-collar melancholy – which vary from complex character studies of adolescence to edgy accounts of working class anti-heroes in desperate situations – are by no means a thing of modernity.

(Val Guest, 1960, StudioCanal, PG)

The versatile British journeyman Val Guest (1911-2006) began his prolific movie career in the 1930s writing scripts for comedies starring Will Hay and the Crazy Gang and was still directing in the 1980s. But his memorable films are genre pictures made in the late 50s and early 60s such as this realistic police procedural thriller, an unusual departure for Hammer, shot in black and white on gritty, unfamiliar Manchester locations. The formidable star is the toughest British actor of the day, Stanley Baker, just then embarking on a four-movie partnership with Joseph Losey. He's a no-nonsense cop, anticipating TV's Z-Cars, which started the following year, and he's pursuing a vicious escaped convict. The violence is unusually convincing for a British movie and fresh observations include an illegal gambling school involved in pitch and toss on the edge of the city.

Guest's dialogue is abrasive and unsentimental,...

Kind Hearts director Robert Hamer shows the same masterly ensemble control two years earlier in this East End melodrama

Robert Hamer's brilliant, brittle melodrama of London's East End, originally released in 1947, came out two years before his masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets. It shows the same masterly ensemble control. The film is in many ways a precursor to kitchen-sink movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – and that huge, teeming market scene bears comparison with Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis. It follows a typical Sunday in a working-class neighbourhood. It's raining of course, but there's nothing dull and Sunday-ish about what's going to happen. Googie Withers is Rose, a former barmaid who has settled for marriage with a dull but steady widower with children. Handsome escaped convict Tommy Swann (John McCallum) turns up in their garden shed, pleading for help: she and Tommy were once sweethearts and his reappearance...

By Lee Pfeiffer 

As a political junkie, I didn't think anything would tempt me to miss last night's much-anticipated first debate between President Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney, but an invitation from Eon Productions to attend the New York premiere of the acclaimed documentary Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of James Bond proved too tempting to resist. The film is a triumph for director Stevan Riley and his team, who worked for over a year and a half to put together the most unique look at the longest-running series in cinema history. The event took place at the Museum of Modern Art. The screening itself, in digital format, was enthusiastically received by all including some people who profess not to be particularly enamored of the films themselves but who felt the angle of covering the human side of the producer's stories was successful and engrossing on all levels.

This great producer left his mark on much more than just the James Bond franchise, writes John Patterson

When it comes time to celebrate 50 years of the James Bond franchise on Friday – Dr No was released on 5 October, 1962 – I hope we recall the half-forgotten man of the whole enterprise: the man who, after reading Goldfinger, discerned the potential movie fortune lying dormant in the novels of Ian Fleming; the man who made Sean Connery a star, and sealed Michael Caine's future by giving him his own spy franchise; the man whom one-time producing partner Tony Richardson called "a huckster, a sublime huckster". I hope we remember Harry Saltzman.

Saltzman was, by all accounts, the ultimate caricature of the movie producer: warm, loud, crass, a consummate gambler with the requisite rackety past, a keen eye for the main chance and a tight fist around the purse strings. For all that,...

While Max Bygraves is naturally best remembered as a variety entertainer, the films he made at the height of his fame in the 1950s deserve closer attention. They provide connections between postwar dramas such as Brighton Rock (1947) and Cosh Boy (1953) and the more celebrated kitchen-sink realism that followed the critical and commercial success of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).

A Cry from the Streets (1958) is a sentimental but revealing social drama about unwanted kids and state children's homes. Spare the Rod (1961) has Bygraves as a liberal teacher questioning the treatment Donald Pleasence's brutish headmaster hands out to working-class pupils. In both of these, Bygraves lends his easygoing "man of the people" persona to confront unpleasant social realities – extraordinary for a "family entertainer" in any period, but in the 1950s, a brave and individual one.

Perhaps even more remarkably, in Charley Moon (1956) Bygraves portrays a performer much like himself, touring...

The brothers-in-film have been brilliant and Tony Scott will be sadly missed. He and Sir Ridley have also been part of a fascinating process: the creation of an unreal world beloved of London - and therefore of the UK's decision-makers

The careers of Tony Scott and his brother Sir Ridley are exemplars of how the talent of the north of England will out, in their case from Grangefield grammar at Stockton (whose alumni also include the novelist and Booker Prizewinner Pat Barker) and West Hartlepool college of art.

Both places are still part of the local education system although in different forms, as might be expected after more than half a century, Grangefield as a comprehensive technology college and West Hartlepool as part of Cleveland college of art and design. They continue a grand tradition which played a major part in an area requiring artistic and design talent for its...

I saw this movie for the first and only time crossing the Atlantic in 1957, on the Mauritania, on the way to the States. My fellow English Speaking Union scholars and I, still in the grip of Look Back in Anger and seething from the moral and political debacle of Suez, regarded it with mirthful contempt. It was the kind of stilted, patronising British movie about working-class and lower-middle-class life we were in flight from after we'd just embraced Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, The Catered Affair and The Bachelor Party, and been thrilled by Ealing's Alexander Mackendrick making his American debut with Sweet Smell of Success. It's now being revived, or disinterred, as a major harbinger of British kitchen-sink realism, a term coined in the mid-1950s by my future mentor David Sylvester.

The movie turns upon a lower-middle-class clerk (stiff-upper-lip specialist Anthony Quayle) preparing to leave his loving, depressed, slatternly...

The 78-year-old Britsh actor, whose 1957 film Woman in a Dressing Gown is being re-released, talks about her rebellious past, why she's not dame material – and what she'd love to do next

Sylvia Syms sits in her lovely flat in west London explaining how she avoided being treated as a piece of meat in the 1950s. There was an "assumption that because you were blond and an actress, you were available," she says. Determined not to be "pretty, available and treated like shit", she took inspiration from Dame Sybil Thorndike.

"I thought, that's what I want," says Syms, who seems to have worked with every British screen legend – from Dirk Bogarde to Michael Caine – during her seven decades in film, TV and theatre. "I want to go on working when I'm an old lady and have that kind of jolliness and respect, which she had. She was just incredible."

Syms turns on me like a hawk.

As we celebrate sixty years of the Queen's reign, our blogger explains how film can trick your pupils into learning about the UK's heritage - and their own identity

The poster on my classroom wall, a publicity shot for last year's part British film, Hugo, shows a boy hanging from the hands of a clock, in a parody of a famous Harold Lloyd portrait. It serves as more than decoration. Time and again it's used in lessons to illustrate the language of imagery: the clash of colours, the angle of the dangling feet, the font of the title, the expression on the protagonist's face. It illustrates how, a century on from the pioneering cinema of the Lumieres and Melies and the birth of the Hollywood studios, movies have found their way into every nook and cranny of school timetables.

Hele's School in Plymouth uses film extensively to reinforce learning...

Twickenham Film Studios' sad end, gunfight at a vacant lot near the Ok Corral and Joely Richardson's family semaphore habit

✒ Round where we live we're very sad indeed about the likely closure of Twickenham Film Studios. Many great British and foreign films have been made there, including the Beatles movies, Alfie, The Italian Job, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Fish Called Wanda, Blade Runner and more recently My Week with Marilyn and War Horse. The studio, which occasionally brought a faint dusting of star glamour to our suburb, has been on the site for 99 years. Now there's a petition to save it, signed by among others Steven Spielberg, Colin Firth and John Landis.

There is some puzzlement about why it has gone into administration. Someone who works there told me this week that it had been badly managed for years. Now comes the horrible news that Taylor...

Credits roll for studios used for Repulsion, Blade Runner and Beatles films as owners sell up following financial losses

Twickenham Film Studios, which have been used for films as diverse as Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and current Oscars hopeful My Week with Marilyn, are to be closed just one year ahead of the facility's centennial anniversary.

Administrator Gerald Krasner said the business was losing money and would be wound down between now and June, with half of its 17 employees having already left. It was unlikely to be maintained as a film studio by new owners, he said. "We are selling it on," Mr Krasner told the BBC News website. "Everyone will then be paid in full."

Twickenham opened in 1913 as St Margaret's Studios and was given its current moniker in 1929 by one of its most famous owners, British film magnate Julius Hagen. Built on the...

It's the best of times, it's the worst of times. You can stay in bed, but the week is looming. Here are the best film moments about that most ambivalent of days

Sunday is a day of ritual and taboo. Some have rites that must be observed. Maybe you go to church. Maybe you have brunch, or a big family dinner. Or maybe you drink a lot of beer and watch the Nascar racing.

For others, there are things that one should never do on a Sunday. Like work, or wear comfortable clothes ... or turn tricks.

Perhaps Sunday is the day you lie in bed and recover from the night before, trying to recall all of the stupid things you said and to steel yourself for the responsibilities of the week ahead?

Whether Sunday is for praying or playing, it has found its way into many great films. Can you...

Empire Magazine has issued the a list of what they determine to be the 100 Best British Films of All-Time and as far as how they decided "What was a British film?" it seems sort of arbitrary in some cases as the Terry Gilliam-directed Brazil and Michelangelo Antonioni-directed Blow-Up both make the list despite the helmers being of American and Italian descent. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 appears on the list as well, despite being a big Hollywood production. I'm not sure if you'll be nitpicking on those facts too hard though as I'm sure the overall placement of the films will bother you more in some cases. Personally, looking over the list there are a few films I just plain don't like. I know it's not popular to say it, but I don't like Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now and it's ranked number four...

Have you ever wondered what are the films that inspire the next generation of visionary filmmakers? As part of our monthly Ioncinephile profile (read here), we ask the filmmaker the incredibly arduous task of identifying their top ten list of favorite films. This month we feature Andrew Haigh whose Weekend was released to in late September via Sundance Selects. Here are Andrew Haigh's Top 10 Films of All Time as of October 2011. Distant - Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2002) "The melancholy of life seems to drip from every frame and it is a film I keep coming back to with amazement." Don't Look Now - Nicolas Roeg (1973) "A horror film that is really a study into grief and the profound effects that it can have on a person." Fanny and Alexander  - Ingmar Bergman (19xx) "It's a hard choice because he has made so many classics, but this seems to be the...

Ludwig II… Stripp’d

0. The Challenge of Escapism

Like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), we live our lives obsessed by thoughts of escape. Escape from our jobs, escape from our relationships, escape from our friends and escape from a life dominated by work, travel and a raging torrent of TV dinners and talent shows that carries us all the way to our graves. Capitalism is the greatest prison of all because its walls are built not of bricks and mortar but of dreams and aspiration. The marketplace is saturated with opportunities to escape the mundane drudgery of our lives: Get a better job! Move to the country! Get plastic surgery! Get a better boyfriend! Get a better body! Dress like Cheryl Cole! We work impossible hours at impossible jobs in the hope that someday we might find a way of being another person in another place.

We want out.

Set in the stark middle-of-nowhere town of Nottingham, Andrew Haigh’s Weekend tells a love story that is destined never to happen. Russell (Tom Cullen), a gay man who works as a lifeguard at the local municipal pool, had no real plans for the weekend: Hang out with his straight friends on Friday, work on Saturday, go to his goddaughter’s birthday party on Sunday. That was before he picked up Glen (Tim New) at a gay club Friday night, and the two fall — at first warily, and then headlong — into a romance with an expiration date. On Sunday afternoon, Glen is to board a train that will whisk him away for a two-year art course in America. But before then, the two hang out, have sex, visit a carnival, drink, smoke some dope and talk, a lot. Glen starts the conversation Saturday morning by pulling out a tape recorder...

Filed under: Movie News

Here's a triple threat: The very busy Martin Scorsese (he just finished his first family film, 'Hugo,' which will hit theaters this Thanksgiving; he's putting the finishing touches on 'George Harrison: Living in the Material World'; he's getting ready for an adaptation of the Shusaku Endo novel 'Silence'; and there may be a 'Sinatra' in his future) has signed on to Paramount's remake of 'The Gambler,' a 1974 film starring James Caan. And who should be attached to star in the redo? None other than the equally busy Leonardo DiCaprio ('J. Edgar,' 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Django Unchained'), who has starred for the director in 'The Gangs of New York, 'The Aviator,' the 2006 best picture Oscar winner 'The Departed' and 'Shutter island.' And lined up to pen the redo is William Monahan,...

Ok, so we’ve had another – albeit much lower key – royal wedding this weekend, as the Queens granddaughter Zara Phillips wed her Rugby captain boyfriend Mike Tindall…so I’m feeling all patriotic again and want to let you know what I believe are the 10 Greatest British films of all time!

Us Brits produce a diverse range of films these days, covering anything from psychological horror to mushy romantic comedies via gripping wartime thrillers and tense emotional dramas. And by George, we do it blooming well at times! So in honour of celebrating all that is spiffing about this glorious nation of ours, here’s what I consider to be the 10 greatest British films of all time…

10. The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)

Combining hilarious madcap comedy with thrills and suspense aplenty, this Ealing film is exactly what comedy is about. One of the films that helped give the studio a name for itself,...

Writer whose novels signalled a sea-change in British literature

Stan Barstow, who has died aged 83, belonged to a generation of working-class writers who became famous in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like his peers Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, David Storey and Keith Waterhouse, he was born in the depression years of the interwar period and flowered as a novelist in the booming welfare state of postwar Britain. Barstow and his fellow, primarily northern, writers were products of this remarkable transformation in the social landscape of Britain, and their creativity was fuelled by the opportunities and anxieties that such an enormous process of change inevitably generated.

Barstow arrived on the literary scene in 1960 with his first published novel, A Kind of Loving. An unsentimental and unpatronising portrayal of an unhappy marriage, it struck a new note of sombre and sensitive realism. He was riding the crest of a wave: Braine's...

Updated through 6/26.

"The golden age of New York moviegoing is now," argues Ao Scott in the New York Times. "Two events in the coming days offer confirmation of this hunch." Tonight "in Brooklyn the BAMcinemaFest opens with Weekend, Andrew Haigh's bracing, present-tense exploration of sex, intimacy and love, the first of 26 features that will play, along with 24 short films, over the next 10 days. And Friday is the official opening night of the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, a charming two-screen jewel box carved (by the architect David Rockwell) out of garage and office space at Lincoln Center." He touches on the Museum of the Moving Image and the reRun Gastropub Theater as well, before returning to BAMcinemaFEST: "Not everything in the lineup is quite so perfectly realized as Weekend, but the range and generosity of the sampling make it hard to go wrong. Even the misfires and train wrecks are interesting,...

Us art and music may have embraced the European avant garde, but how big was its impact on Hollywood?

On the cover of Richard Pells's Modernist America are pictures of George Gershwin, Marlon Brando, the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building – a Dadaist litany that quite fails to do justice to the book's capacious grasp. Everyone from Bardot to Bartók, from Le Corbusier to Le Carré, from Tennessee Williams to Indiana Jones is crammed into its pages. Not even the kitchen sink is missing. Having discussed the neo-realism of Fellini and Bertolucci, Pells moves straight on to analysing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and other kitchen-sink classics of half a century ago.

The book's thesis is that fears of Us cultural imperialism are overblown. If the modern world has been taken over by American art, then that is only because American artists have taken so much from modernists around the world.

How did Dirk Bogarde get from Doctor in the House to The Night Porter? With a wilful desire to destroy his matinee idol status. And the signs were there for all to see in his early work

The Odeon, Leicester Square, 1960. The red-carpet premiere of a film that will change the story of British film and British society. The lights are killed, the crowd falls silent. The roar of industrial machinery thrums from the speakers. And over the noise comes the voice of the hero, a Brylcreemed lathe-operator with greasy overalls and insolent good looks. "Don't let the bastards grind you down," says Dirk Bogarde, and with those words, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and its star give instant definition to the new decade.

In some fairly proximate parallel universe, this is how the 1960s might have begun. It could have happened here, too, if the owner of Pinewood studios...

Making its world premiere in the Emerging Visions section at SXSW 2011, British writer-director Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend” starts with a one-night stand that becomes something else. On a Friday night after hanging out with his straight mates, Russell (Tom Cullen) heads out to a gay club, alone and on the pull. Just before closing time he picks up Glen (Chris New), and that weekend, in bars and in bedrooms, getting drunk and taking drugs, telling stories and having sex, the two men get to know each other. It is an encounter that will resonate throughout their lives. Here, Haigh writes for Moving Pictures about the challenges of financing and filming a picture with this subject matter.

By Andrew Haigh (writer-director of “Weekend”)

(from SXSW 2011)

Andrew Haigh

I wanted to make a film about two guys falling for each other and do so with honesty and authenticity. “Weekend” is unapologetically a love story,...