Of Mary
Oh how my heart broke. I won’t say too much about Adrian Lester’s film Oh Mary for fear of giving anything away but Kehinde Fadipe and Tom Brooke are just lovely in this achingly beautiful film about how life really can be a bitch sometimes.
New Blood
Tom Limon’s crime caper New Blood is a cheeky little bit of fun. Starring the impossibly handsome Liam Garrigan as Steve, a man whose considerable business success appears to made jealous enemies of those around him, the film manages to make torture funny in a very deadpan British way and uses the word ‘numpties’ so it clearly is a winner.
Drop
The opening section of Gavin Toomey’s Drop is just gorgeous – Russell Tovey’s bored security guard illuminated by the screens he’s barely watching, until his attention is drawn by a figure on edge of a rooftop. Roused from his stupor, Ben treks up to the top of the inner-city building and encounters Greg – their meeting is brief but significant, they’re two completely different people yet somehow connected and though Toomey’s screenplay cleverly leaves much unsaid, there’s something achingly gorgeous that still transpires. Tovey and Antony Edridge are both excellent and a string-laden soundtrack captures the elegiac mood perfectly.
A Changed Man
In A Changed Man, Jens Jonsson taps into much of the awkwardness of school reunions - the banter with people you’ve fallen out of touch with for a good reason, the forced reminiscences of unhappier times, the ease with which people fall back into old patterns of playground behaviour – and whilst he may not say much that is particularly new, it is impossible to tear the eyes from his film, his camera’s ever-present, ever-circling gaze has a voyeuristic quality that is most compelling. Rupert Proctor is heartbreaking as the man who comes to realise that nothing has changed since his unhappy schooldays no matter how hard he tries and Kate Fleetwood, Poppy Miller and Claire Rushbrook all impress as the women from his past.
Labels: Adrian Lester, Cecilia Noble, Claire Rushbrook, Film, Jack Ashton, Kate Fleetwood, Kehinde Fadipe, Liam Garrigan, Lolita Chakrabarti, Martin Savage, Poppy Miller, Robert Glenister, Russell Tovey, Tom Brooke