British cinema spans everything from the Hammer horror boom of the 1950s and 60s to the gritty social realism that films like Fish Tank made impossible to ignore. That range, from The Curse of Frankenstein to kitchen-sink drama, is a big part of what makes it so consistently interesting. Have a browse through Macca's UK reviews below.
Rating: 3.0★
Terence Davies is one of British cinema's most singular voices, a filmmaker whose work sits at the uncomfortable crossroads of memory, faith, class and longing. Born and raised in Liverpool, he spent the early part of his career turning the landscapes and emotional textures of his childhood into
Rating: 2.5★
The Aran Islands sit off the west coast of County Galway, three limestone outcrops where the Atlantic has the run of things and the soil, such as it is, has to be coaxed from seaweed and sand. By the early twentieth century they had acquired a particular romantic charge in
Country United Kingdom
There is a lot to admire in Laundreams, and my only real complaint is that there isn't more of it. Amber Gadd and Evie Ward-Drummond's debut short, set almost entirely inside a working Sheffield laundrette, is a warm, nicely made little thing with a real
Rating: 3.5★
Ask me to picture James Bond, and, sacrilege though it surely is with Connery and Moore both in the room, I don't reach for either of them. I see Pierce Brosnan, tuxedo immaculate, Walther in hand, in GoldenEye. That image is lodged somewhere deep, and after rewatching it
Rating: 3.5★
By 2006, the Bond franchise had well and truly lost the plot. The Brosnan years had drifted into self-parody, and Die Another Day, with its invisible car and that excruciating CGI surfing sequence, was the nadir of a series that had stopped taking itself seriously some time before that.
Rating: 3.5★
Some films you find for yourself. This one was handed to me, in a school history class, and it is one of the rare occasions I can say the curriculum did me a favour. Peter Medak's drama tells the true story of Derek Bentley, a young man with
Rating: 2.5★
There are films you respect without ever really feeling, and Distant Voices, Still Lives is one of them. I can see exactly why it is held in such high regard, can feel the devotion and the pain baked into every frame, and still come away from it strangely untouched. That
Rating: 3.0★
The Great Escape, but with chickens. I'll be honest: that is not a bad pitch at all. And in the hands of Aardman, the studio that built its reputation on meticulous, lovingly hand-crafted stop-motion, it should be an absolute home run. The result is good. It
Rating: 2.0★
The most baffling thing about Magicians is what it does with the two people it hired to carry the whole thing. David Mitchell and Robert Webb, Peep Show royalty and one of the sharpest comedy pairings British television has produced in years, are kept apart for the bulk of the
Rating: 3.0★
You have seen the bones of Man on Fire before, probably several times over. A burnt-out, hard-drinking former operative reluctantly takes a job protecting a young girl; they clash, they bond, she is snatched, and he sets about a merciless campaign to get her back. It is the
Country United Kingdom
Bel was, for me, one of the most moving films of the year, a tender, aching portrait of the Scottish-Kenyan musician Beldina Odenyo, who recorded as Heir of the Cursed, built by director Louise Lockwood as something much closer to an act of love than a conventional documentary. You
Rating: 3.5★
On paper, Blade Runner is exactly my sort of thing. A rain-soaked cyberpunk future, a moral puzzle at its heart, a premise that asks what it even means to be human. Ridley Scott's 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick imagines a world where bio-engineered humans called
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