This film puts Andrew Scott in line to become the first out gay man to win the best actor Oscar. He plays Ian Charleson, who became a star in Chariots of Fire and in 1989 took on the role of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre when Daniel Day-Lewis withdrew, despite being desperately ill with Aids, knowing that the strain would accelerate his illness. For Charleson, the play’s themes of life and death, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, were all too real.
Fans of Manchester, Manchesterism and indie British film-maker Carol Morley will relish the thought of her much anticipated new movie, adapted from her autobiographical novel of the same title. The lead character, Ann, based on Morley herself, experiences an emotional crisis as a teen and takes refuge in the thrilling new Manchester music scene, featuring bands including Joy Division, New Order and Magazine. Lucy Halliday is Ann and her mum and dad are played by Gemma Whelan and Aidan Gillen.
Polish film-maker Paweł Pawlikowski has created a brilliantly poised, superbly performed historical vignette in black-and-white whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ anguish. Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller play Thomas and Erika Mann – that is, the great Nobel-winning German author and his daughter. After the war and the destruction of the Nazis, whose tyranny he escaped by fleeing to the US, Mann returns to Germany with daughter in tow, to accept prizes in the fatherland’s capitalist West and communist East.
But he is in denial about a terrible family crisis. Surely the year’s best debut feature? French cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan tells a gripping story of a school trip to Pompeii: an emotionally troubled teacher has to keep an emotionally troubled bunch of kids in line.
Perhaps the most difficult is a boy called Toni, who has always believed a story told him by his mum that he has aristocratic lineage from a Pompeii nobleman whose castle was reduced to rubble by southern Italy’s 1980 earthquake, an event he thinks is thrillingly analogous to the Pompeii disaster. He’s heading for his own emotional earthquake. Birmingham is the setting for this absorbing and moving social realist picture from film-maker Clio Barnard, featuring terrific performances from its young cast.
It’s a home town drama about a city to which the characters are fundamentally loyal while simultaneously longing to escape; as they approach the end of their 20s, they must come to terms with decisions and life choices. Joe Cole, Daryl McCormack, Lola Petticrew, Anthony Boyle and Jay Lycurgo are the cast-members bursting with energy, tenderness and vulnerability. Andrew Haigh’s mysterious and beautiful new film is adapted by him from a story by Colm Tóibín: a poignant, subversive study of grief and desire, and the terrible, infantilised loneliness of men without women.
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