Ben Flanagan

Indroduction to my new publication, Cinema Year Zero.

“Local Heroes” is a Vague Visages column dedicated to movie theater memories and the theatrical experience.

Interview with Shannon Murphy, director of Babyteeth.

Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen begins like a bad joke: Matthew McConaughey walks into a pub, asks for a pint and a pickled egg, and gets shot in the head. Leaving behind the VFX clutter that marked disasters like King Arthur and Aladdin, Ritchie returns to the guns ‘n’ geezers terrain that made his name, surveying the land before him with his old Tarantino-lite tricks. Hence, the film flashes back and forward from that opening, as Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a private eye for a tabloid paper, shows u...

Is there a more tired pursuit than comparing a piece of pop culture to Donald Trump? He’s our pop culture president, a blob of references that could mean anything to anyone and nothing to everyone. The fiery blond tuft of hair, Twitter-happy demeanor and casual racism are so easily mimicked. From his rise as a property mogul with spurious ethics, to his unsolicited public intervention in the Central Park Five case, to playing hardboiled host on The Apprentice, Trump’s hyper-powered branding m...

In between previews of awards fare and highlights from the year’s festival circuit, each edition of the Ghent Film Festival delivers a focus on one nation. In recent years, Nordic and American independent cinema, Britain, France, Hungary, and Italy have all had the treatment. This year, the festival has turned to Spain. Alongside a main strand of contemporary Spanish cinema, comes a selection of older ‘Classics’, including a significant retrospective of Augustí Villaronga (°1953). The program...

The pair’s six pre-Code Paramount films remain the ultimate synthesis of star and director.

First, Do No Harm is the last in an anthology of monologues representing the different decades in the life cycle of the NHS. Initially staged in 2018, this final part features Sharon D. Clarke as the Greek goddess Hygia, who pleads with jeering citizens to take more care of their bodies and, by extension, the NHS itself. In June, writer Bernadine Evaristo became the first woman of colour to top the British book charts with her Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other (shared with Margaret Atwood’s d...

The sea of theatre streaming options, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, has joyfully made enjoying drama accessible to a far larger audience than just those who were able to afford tickets to major venues. One hopes this will spark the imagination of future dramaturges and directors, but with such a wealth of options, one wonders if there is a coherent way to find routes into what to watch or avoid. Fortunately, the eye-catching The Grinning Man gives viewers something to smile about. From...

Streaming on YouTube as part of the National Theatre at Home, The Madness of King George III runs not from the South Bank, but the Nottingham Playhouse’s 2018 production starring Mark Gatiss. Considering the play’s origins at the NT’s Lyttelton Theatre when it was directed by Nicholas Hytner, this production sits comfortably in a collection alongside recent offerings of Coriolanus and Frankenstein, entertaining a range of theatre-starved audiences and fundraising along the way.
Alan Bennett’s...

Amos Levin, as told to Ben Flanagan
When lockdown started in the UK and the US I came across this link on Twitter, I can’t remember where it came from but it was a link for a Google Drive folder called ‘This Light’. I saw there were a bunch of experimental films and Hollywood films and Japanese films – a huge range. I was surprised and amazed. I got in touch with the email of the guy who runs it – he’s based in LA and his name is Andrew Norman Wilson. He’s a filmmaker in his own right, a movi...

Following a bunch of Republicans who are chased down for blood sport by rich liberals, The Hunt was postponed by Universal after Donald Trump tweeted ‘The movie coming out is made to inflame and cause chaos.’ He wasn’t wrong about its intentions, but Craig Zobel’s satire is occasionally toothless. Less Team America: World Police (2005) than The Running Man (1987), it’s a solid piece of Blumhouse fare that uses its own genre awareness to send up political negligence. Zobel presents this hunt a...

Wintopia director Mira Burt-Wintonick on how she worked out a personal approach to making a documentary eulogy to her father, filmmaker Peter Wintonick.

Hong Sang-soo makes films so quickly that distributors can’t keep up. Completing as many as three films in a given year, It may be difficult to find room in the cinema release calendar for the South Korean director’s low-key thematic repetitions of young people in and out of love, drinking and bitching, playing out in few shots and with his trademark zooms punctuating the drama. Outlining his process at a NYFF talk in 2017, Hong described his process: the whole script is written in the early hours before the first day of production, and editing, or “trimming,” is completed in around a day. Som