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For a brief period, over 1982-86, the U.K. enjoyed a remarkable film renaissance. Four films – “Chariots of Fire,” (1982) “Gandhi,” (1983) “The Killing Fields” (1985) and “The Mission” (1986) – won a total 19 Academy Awards, including Best Picture two years running. All of those films, save “Gandhi,” were produced by David Puttnam.

To this day, few figures are more associated with a national film revival. “The British are coming,” “The Chariots of Fire” screenwriter Colin Welland famously said in his Oscar speech. The main Brit Hollywood had on their radar was Puttnam. He was appointed CEO of Columbia Pictures in 1986, becoming the first and only foreigner ever, he notes, to serve on the board of the MPA.

Knighted in 1995, Puttman ended his film career in 1997, at 56, when he was appointed a life peer. “When I finished ‘Memphis Belle,’ I kind of knew that I was never going to make better films than the ones I’d already produced,...

This David Puttnam-produced parable of patriotism, faith and meritocratic success – rereleased in honour of the 1924 event – is on the level of classic Hollywood

In honour of both the imminent Paris Olympics and the centenary of the 1924 Olympics, also in Paris, here is a rerelease of this superbly watchable true-story parable of patriotism, faith and meritocratic success within the system, much admired by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden. It was produced by David Puttnam, who had discovered the story of the devout Christian athlete Eric Liddell refusing to run on Sunday and commissioned a terrifically punchy and sympathetic script from Colin Welland (whose victorious Oscar night cry of “the British are coming!” was destined to be endlessly and ironically re-quoted at moments of British failure and disappointment in Hollywood). It was Welland who incorporated Jewish sprinter Harold Abrahams into the film.

The film was directed with gusto by...

As his dazzling debut, Shallow Grave, gets a 30th anniversary rerelease, here’s to an extraordinary career that ranges from Trainspotting to Slumdog Millionaire and that unforgettable London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony

Lancashire-born film-maker Danny Boyle holds a special place in the nation’s heart, having been responsible for not one but three defining moments in our recent pop-culture history. In 1996, his daringly inventive adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting changed the face of young British cinema, with star-making performances from the likes of Ewan McGregor, Kelly Macdonald and Robert Carlyle, and a magpie soundtrack that out-hipped Pulp Fiction. I was co-hosting Radio 1’s film programme when Trainspotting hit UK cinemas, and Mary Anne Hobbs and I immediately ditched our opening station jingles in favour of the thumping drum intro to Lust for Life, which remained the show’s theme tune in perpetuity.

A decade later, Slumdog Millionaire (2008) scooped eight Oscars,...

The filmmaker passed away at the age of 86 following a short illness.

Chariots Of Fire actor Nigel Havers leads the tributes to UK film and commercials director Hugh Hudson who passed away at the age of 86 on Friday (February 10).

The actor called starring in Hudson’s 1981 classic ”one of the greatest experiences of my professional life” and said he was “beyond devastated” by the news. “Like so many others, I owe much of what followed to him. I shall miss him greatly.”

Antonio Banderas, who starred in Hudson’s 2016 Spanish-language film Altamira, said on Twitter: ”Good bye mister Hudson.

Hugh Hudson, whose first feature directing effort Chariots of Fire won four Academy Awards including Best Picture, has died, according to a statement from his family obtained by the BBC. He was 86.

Hudson began his career making documentaries and television commercials, which he continued to do even after his big-screen breakthrough with Chariots of Fire. He worked alongside Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and Tony Scott for Ridley Scott Associates (Rsa). His first filmmaking job was as a second-unit director on Parker’s Midnight Express.

Vincent Canby wrote of Hudson’s Oscar-winning debut in 1981: “It’s to the credit of both Mr. Hudson and Mr. Welland [Colin Welland wrote the screenplay] that Chariots of Fire is simultaneously romantic and commonsensical, lyrical and comic. … It’s an exceptional film, about some exceptional people.”

Also deserving credit for the film’s lyricism was the late composer Vangelis, whom Puttnam had worked with...

Hugh Hudson, who directed the classic Oscar winning film “Chariots of Fire,” died Friday in London. He was 86.

The Guardian said he had died after a short illness. His family released a statement saying, “Hugh Hudson, 86, beloved husband and father, died at Charing Cross hospital on 10 February after a short illness. He is survived by his wife Maryam, his son Thomas and his first wife Sue.”

As a director Hudson could be counted upon to deliver lush, beautifully designed, well-orchestrated scenes.

“Chariots of Fire” was the story of the rivalry between two British runners, one Jewish, the other a devout Christian, culminating in the 1924 Olympics. Hudson was Oscar nominated for best director in 1982, and the movie won four Academy Awards, including best picture and best score for the electronic compositions of Vangelis that somehow worked splendidly in the period film.

Hudson had brought his friend Vangelis onto the project, and...

When Sam Mendes set out to write his latest film, he decided to draw on something he knows best: his own upbringing in 1980s England. “My escape was the cinema,” the director said about his childhood during a recent THR Presents panel, powered by Vision Media and held at EnergaCamerimage. He set Empire of Light amid the backdrop of a movie theater in an unnamed British seaside town. In the film, Olivia Colman plays a theater employee — partially inspired by Mendes’ mother, the novelist Valerie Helene Mendes — who struggles with mental health but starts to come out of her shell when she forges a connection with a young coworker (Micheal Ward).

Empire of Light marks Mendes’ first solo screenplay after co-writing 1917, and the director added nods to some formative films from his era, including Chariots of Fire, which has its regional gala premiere at the titular Empire movie theater, owned...

In 1989, Euzhan Palcy became the first black woman to direct a major studio movie when she helmed A Dry White Season for MGM. A brutal yet inspiring anti-apartheid drama, A Dry White Season remains a model of political filmmaking, as Palcy (adapting Andre Brink’s novel with co-screenwriter Colin Welland) boldly and forcefully indicts the South African government of the period with clarity, complexity and passion. Donald Sutherland plays Ben Du Toit, a schoolteacher (a surrogate for both Brink and the movie’s white audience members) who keeps his head buried in the sand when it comes to the injustices around […]...

In 1989, Euzhan Palcy became the first black woman to direct a major studio movie when she helmed A Dry White Season for MGM. A brutal yet inspiring anti-apartheid drama, A Dry White Season remains a model of political filmmaking, as Palcy (adapting Andre Brink’s novel with co-screenwriter Colin Welland) boldly and forcefully indicts the South African government of the period with clarity, complexity and passion. Donald Sutherland plays Ben Du Toit, a schoolteacher (a surrogate for both Brink and the movie’s white audience members) who keeps his head buried in the sand when it comes to the injustices around […]...

A million American GIs are bivouacked in the English countryside, awaiting debarkation to France… and the green fields are loaded with young English women, whose own men have been off fighting for years. John Schlesinger puts together a good drama, with an excellent cast; he also avoids the expected ‘please wait for me!’ clichés attendant to this subgenre of war film.

Yanks

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1979 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 139 min. / Street Date , 2019 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95

Starring: Richard Gere, Lisa Eichhorn, Vanessa Redgrave, William Devane, Chick Vennera, Wendy Morgan, Rachel Roberts, Tony Melody, Derek Thompson.

Cinematography: Dick Bush

Film Editor: Jim Clark

Original Music: Richard Rodney Bennett

Written by Colin Welland, Walter Bernstein

Produced by Joseph Janni, Lester Persky

Directed by John Schlesinger

Director John Boorman got to tell his personal wartime home front story in his warm and funny Hope and Glory, and eight years earlier the...

The end of the London Film Festival highlights the growing success of a new wave of UK film-makers, including Michael Pearce and Rungano Nyoni

Ever since the late Colin Welland collected his screenwriting Oscar for Chariots of Fire in 1982 and declared with a most un-British triumphalism that “The British are coming!”, such public displays of confidence in the country’s film industry have been uncommon, even frowned upon. Perhaps it is time to amend Welland’s cry this year and state the obvious: the British are here. In 2017, there have been more distinctive homegrown debut features funded, made and released, displaying a greater diversity of theme and focus, than in any other year in recent memory.

Previously it has been possible to identify small, localised pockets of new talent: think of 2006, when both Andrea Arnold (Red Road) and Paul Andrew Williams (London to Brighton) made their debuts, or 2008, which brought...

When Colin Welland, accepting his screenwriting Oscar for “Chariots of Fire” in 1982, echoed Paul Revere’s famous words “the British are coming!,” it’s widely felt he ushered in a long period of decline in the fortunes of U.K. filmmaking in the U.S. So we don’t want to make the same mistake here, and will just point out that, in addition to all the British imports that have already snuck past Customs and Border Protection and onto American screens, in just a few weeks we see season 3 of “Catastrophe” come to Amazon (this Friday), and the first two seasons of “Chewing Gum” come to Netflix, to no little fanfare.

Continue reading ‘Chewing Gum,’ ‘Catastrophe’ And The Rise Of UK TV Comedy at The Playlist.

Exclusive: Producer Stephen Woolley (Carol) worked with David Bowie, the actor as well as the musician, 30 years ago on Julien Temple’s ill-fated Absolute Beginners. Massively hyped in its day as an example of the bold, new confident face of British cinema (remember Colin Welland’s “the British are coming”?), the film was a day-glo imagining of London’s 1950s Soho replete with mods, prostitutes and the Notting Hill race riots. While the film was a commercial…...

Tony Staveacre writes: Colin Welland had started to add screenwriting to his distinguished acting credits when we invited him to be one of the judges for our BBC2 playwriting competition in 1972, alongside Keith Dewhurst and John Hopkins. The undisputed winner was a harbour-master’s wife from Sunderland, Denise Robertson, and this first play launched a great broadcasting career for her. Her play – The Soda Water Fountain – was recorded and shown on BBC2, after which we were to broadcast a judges’ discussion. This prompted Colin to launch into a tirade about the production that he’d just seen, and a complaint that the play had been woefully miscast, with not a single authentic Tyneside voice to be heard.

He had a point. The leading role was played by Jessie Matthews. Also, the play had been recorded in a BBC studio, when it should have been filmed on the real north-east locations where it was set,...

Roy Battersby writes: Auditioning in a grim Salford secondary modern school for boys to play parts in Roll on Four O’Clock in 1970, Colin Welland, Ken Trodd and I also talked about the big strike of mostly women clothing workers in Leeds that same year. The result was the epic BBC Play for Today film Leeds United!, written by Colin, produced by Ken, directed by me, transmitted in 1974, repeated once in 1975, praised, admired and traduced, and since seen only at festivals, academic film gatherings and the National Film Theatre – but always to great appreciation. By heck, it’s a wonderful script and film, and should be included in Colin’s bio as one of his finest works. He always had such a wonderful way of giving a voice to those without one, but who have so much to tell us.

W Stephen Gilbert writes: Outstanding among Colin Welland’s achievements...

Colin Welland was an unswervingly good man, a fine actor, and a seriously gifted screenwriter.

These gifts not only brought him most of the accolades TV and cinema can offer, but cemented the careers of everyone who rode on the back of his Chariots of Fire. The depth of his feelings and sense of identity with the people he wrote about were achingly real.

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In today's roundup: Interviews with Werner Herzog, Gaspar Noé, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Telaroli and Kurt Walker. Richard Linklater on Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-Féminin, Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados, Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, Ulrike Ottinger's Ticket of No Return, Martin Scorsese's New York, New York and Nagisa Oshima's The Ceremony. Vanity Fair's Bill Murray profile. Remembering actor and scriptwriter Colin Welland (Chariots of Fire). Simon Callow on Orson Welles. News of forthcoming films by Shane Carruth, Xavier Dolan, Duncan Jones and Edgar Wright—and more. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup: Interviews with Werner Herzog, Gaspar Noé, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Telaroli and Kurt Walker. Richard Linklater on Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-Féminin, Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados, Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, Ulrike Ottinger's Ticket of No Return, Martin Scorsese's New York, New York and Nagisa Oshima's The Ceremony. Vanity Fair's Bill Murray profile. Remembering actor and scriptwriter Colin Welland (Chariots of Fire). Simon Callow on Orson Welles. News of forthcoming films by Shane Carruth, Xavier Dolan, Duncan Jones and Edgar Wright—and more. » - David Hudson...

Actor and screenwriter who took Hollywood by storm with the 1981 film Chariots of Fire

When Colin Welland, who has died aged 81 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, was handed the Oscar for his screenplay of Chariots of Fire in 1982, he waved it in the air like a battle mace and declared: “The British are coming!” In fact, it was some years before another British film received an Academy award. But Welland as a screenwriter had certainly arrived.

Hollywood recognition for Chariots of Fire, which was based on the true story of two athletes in the 1924 Olympics, gave him immense satisfaction. He later wrote that the initial American reaction to the idea had been: who wants a story about two runners from long ago? “When we showed it at Twickenham, a Hollywood producer left after 10 minutes, came back at the end and said that they wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

As the writer of Chariots of Fire and a thoroughly relatable actor, Welland exemplified a bluff British egalitarianism that prompted a widespread affection

For better or worse, actor and scriptwriter Colin Welland will always be remembered for the pronouncement he offered on receiving the best original screenplay Oscar for Chariots of Fire: “The British are coming!” The supposed hubris behind the remark was roundly mocked in the ensuing decades, as British cinema struggled fitfully for lift-off, and the flag-waving patriotism of the sentiment seemed to sit oddly with Welland himself, a north-of-England socialist of impeccable credentials.

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Colin Welland passed away yesterday (November 2), aged 81.

The Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire writer died after suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Welland won the Oscar in 1982 for Best Original Screenplay, and gave his famous "the British are coming" acceptance speech.

He was also an accomplished actor and won a BAFTA for playing Mr Farthing in Ken Loach's Kes in 1969.

His family said in a statement: "Colin will be desperately missed by his family and friends.

"Alzheimer's is a cruel illness and there have been difficult times but in the end Colin died peacefully in his sleep.

"We are proud of Colin's many achievements during his life but most of all he will be missed as a loving and generous friend, husband, father and granddad."...

Colin Welland, who famously proclaimed, “The British are coming!” in his Academy Award acceptance speech for Chariots Of Fire, has died at the age of 81 following a long battle with Alzheimer’s. The actor and writer, who appeared in the TV show Z Cars and also acted in Ken Loach’s Kes and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, also wrote the Gene Hackman-starrer Twice In A Lifetime and the Marlon Brando Apartheid drama A Dry White Season. A statement released by his family via…...

The 1981 film “Chariots of Fire” directed by Hugh Hudson and written by Colin Welland, won 4 Oscars at the 1982 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Costume Design and Best Original Music Score for an impressively epic soundtrack from Vangelis, who would go on to score “Blade Runner” a year later. Revolving around the lives of Scottish Olympian Eric Liddell, played by Ian Charleston, and British athlete Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), the movie tells the tale of their rivalry that culminates in a competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics. Now, “The Last Race” is being made, a film that concerns itself with the latter half of Liddell’s life post-’Chariots,’ as he travels back to China to become a teacher and missionary, in case you wanted to see that part of Liddell's story on the big screen. China was also Liddell’s birthplace as well as his place of death, where...

In the midst of recession, the UK's creative industries have been quietly outperforming the rest of British industry

Colin Welland famously exclaimed "the British are coming!" while accepting an Oscar for Chariots of Fire in 1982. Three decades on, Mr Welland could feel a tinge of satisfaction when looking through the Academy Awards nominations. Heading the list of UK contenders is Londoner Steve McQueen's film 12 Years a Slave, which will be vying for best picture and best director with Gravity, the spacewalk thriller whose visual effects were created at Shepperton Studios. Brit actors Judi Dench, Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope have nominations for the comedy Philomena, as do Christian Bale and Sally Hawkins for their roles in American Hustle and Blue Jasmine.

These British hopefuls – and there are many more – may come to little on the night, but even if they do, anyone who shares a Welland-like interest in our...

Philomena, The Selfish Giant, Gravity … some of the year's best and biggest movies have their roots in the UK. Rush producer Andrew Eaton says it's time to fly the flag for British films

• Is British film all kitsch 'n' sink? Director Mike Figgis argues that the UK movie industry holds back film-makers

• Black British film talent tops Golden Globe nominations

As someone who was born and grew up in Northern Ireland, I've always been aware of the pitfalls of labelling something "British". I've been surprised many times about how messy it gets in the world of film. Everyone remembers Colin Welland's battle cry when Chariots of Fire triumphed at the Oscars in 1981: "The British are coming!"

Unfortunately, for much of my working life in film, very much inspired by Mr Welland and his colleagues, labelling a film "British" has usually been the kiss of death, both in terms of reviews and box office.

Marlon Brando in ‘A Dry White Season,’ James Earl Jones in ‘Cry the Beloved Country’: Apartheid movies (photo: Marlon Brando in ‘A Dry White Season’) (See previous post: “Nelson Mandela: Sidney Poitier and ‘Malcolm X’ Cameo Apperance.”) Besides the Nelson Mandela movies discussed in the previous two posts, South Africa’s apartheid has been portrayed in a number of films in the last few decades. Among the most notable ones are the following: Zoltan Korda’s Cry the Beloved Country (1951). Based on Alan Paton’s novel, this British-made film features Canada Lee and Charles Carson as two men struggling to deal with the disastrous consequences of apartheid. Ralph Nelson’s The Wilby Conspiracy (1975). Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine star as, respectively, an anti-apartheid South African activist and a British engineer on the run from South Africa’s secret police, headed by racist Nicol Williamson. Chris Menges’ A World Apart...

Fresh from triumph on the festival circuit, a host of exciting British films is set for release. We talk to the directors behind this sudden renaissance

At Cannes, in May, there was anxious talk. Of the 70-plus features showcased at the film festival only two of them were British. Did it signal a decline in the UK industry? By the end of 2013, would our film people be wringing their hands while cinemagoers queued up for American fare and the House of Lords unhappily convened a select committee?

Without a doubt, the pair of British films on show at Cannes were excellent – Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant and Paul Wright's For Those in Peril – both bruising, powerful dramas. But French and American and Mexican and Chinese and Cambodian film-makers left Cannes with the top prizes; meanwhile fans and boosters of British cinema travelled back across the Channel in mild panic.

From Formula One to football and boxing to baseball, here are the big screen's finest sport sagas

Rush

Don't get excited, Liverpool fans: director Ron Howard's latest film isn't about the Reds' all-time leading scorer Ian Rush and his rubbish 'tache. Instead, it tells the extraordinary story of the 1976 Formula One season, dominated by the battle between dashing British playboy driver James Hunt (played by Chris "Thor" Hemsworth) and austere Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel "Good Bye, Lenin!" Brühl). After a near-fatal crash at the Nürburgring, Lauda returned just six weeks later, his horrific scalp burns still bandaged and bleeding, to defend his world title. It's scripted by Peter Morgan, who's made a career out of dramatising real events in the likes of The Queen and Frost/Nixon.

The Damned United

"I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the country. But I'm in the top one." Director Tom Hooper...

The Margaret Thatcher era left an indelible mark on British cinema – not all of it negative. Here we select some key films that distilled the essence of Thatcher's Britain, for better or worse

My Beautiful Laundrette, 1985. Dir: Stephen Frears

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The spirit of free enterprise underpins the Hanif Kureishi-scripted, Stephen Frears-directed comedy – mordant but forward-looking in its equation of immigrant thrift with modern conservative values. Omar, son of a campaigning journalist-in-exile, turns to launderette-management, drug-stealing and inter-ethnic gay sex to boot. Genuinely groundbreaking in its subtle and empathetic portrait of a British Asian community, My Beautiful Laundrette was a teasing provocation to the mindset of the 70s old left. Daniel Day Lewis, of course, made a massive impact as punk rocker Johnny, a stereotype confounder who deserts his street-fighting confreres for Omar's charms. Kureishi's prescience even ran to the...

Producer and director Michael Apted pays tribute to the former Granada TV chairman who died last week

When I joined Granada in 1963, I was part of a small group straight out of university (which included Mike Newell) chosen by Sir Denis Forman, in his role as head of programmes, to train at the company. It was the place to be – ahead of the field in current affairs, drama, light entertainment and comedy. I doubt any of us has any idea of how lucky we were to be asked to join.

Granada was a small company, with neither the space nor resources for serious training, so ours was on-the-job. I did news, some small documentaries, football matches, church services, World In Action, then on to Coronation Street and eventually into drama, working with some to the best writers of their generation: Jack Rosenthal, Arthur Hopcraft and Colin Welland. In those early years,...

Warner Bros. released another one of their book editions of a catalog Blu-ray film and while some of these seem somewhat random in their timing, this one has a nice real-world tie-in as “Chariots of Fire” hits stores just in time for the 2012 Olympics. “Chariots of Fire” is a well-made epic even if my strongest memory of it is related to the stunned realization that it is the movie that beat “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for Best Picture. Yes, the Academy makes mistakes too.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

“Chariots of Fire” has held up expectedly. If, like me, you think it’s an entertaining period drama that was a bit over-praised at the time (it won four Oscars, including Best Picture, but Warren Beatty stole director from Hugh Hudson for “Reds”) then the years are unlikely to have changed that opinion. If you love it, this release will only give you reason to love it more.

Out in time for an Olympics lap of honour, Hugh Hudson's intelligent film has the lineaments of a classic

Hugh Hudson's 1981 Oscar-winner gets a deserved Olympic rerelease: a bold, intelligent, romantic film with all the lineaments of a classic, and a score by Vangelis as instantly hummable as the music for Jaws. As the British team prepare for the 1924 Paris games, we follow two underdog outsiders: Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) is the devout Scot who won't run on a Sunday; Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) is the Jewish runner who faces casual antisemitism at Cambridge University. Screenwriter Colin Welland was a vigorous socialist, but the movie was nonetheless adored by Ronald Reagan for the individual striving and patriotic glory. Hugh Hudson's stylish candlelit college dinner scene at Cambridge may well have inspired the Hogwarts dining-hall scenes in the Harry Potter movies.

Rating: 5/5

DramaPeter Bradshaw

guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian...

'We had to do a running audition. One poor chap bent over and brought up his breakfast'

Hugh Hudson, director

I think David Puttnam [the producer] chose me because he sensed I'd relate to the themes of class and racial prejudice. I'd been sent to Eton because my family had gone there for generations, but I hated all the prejudice. The scriptwriter, Colin Welland, a working-class boy from Merseyside, understood it perfectly, too. So it was a personal story for us.

We cast relative newcomers as we wanted the audience to be with them all equally right from the start, to run with them. Everybody remembers the opening jogging scene along the beach. It was key to establishing character: Harold Abrahams, gaunt and determined; Eric Liddell, Scottish, blond, open and free; Aubrey Montague, the amiable, faithful old dog; Lord Andrew Lindsay, the aristocrat, running for the fun of it.

We'd been filming...

This recut, refurbished version of the story of the American struggle for independence looks and sounds a lot better than the original. But it still features Sid Owen as Al Pacino's son

Director: Hugh Hudson

Entertainment grade: C

History grade: B+

In 1776, the American colonies declared independence from Britain. There followed a fierce and bloody war, which lasted more than eight years.

Reception

When director Hugh Hudson's earlier film Chariots of Fire won four Oscars in 1981, screenwriter Colin Welland famously announced: "The British are coming!" These words are traditionally (and inaccurately) attributed to Patriot rider Paul Revere, who alerted colonial rebels to the British Army's first secret attack in 1775. Two hundred and 10 years later, the British film Revolution was released. For the second time in history, the British found themselves defeated comprehensively by the American revolution. A massive critical and commercial flop on its initial release, Revolution has been...

In the last few weeks two big news stories emerged about the future plans for the British film industry. The first was a report by former Labour culture secretary Lord Smith, which recommended that British filmmaking should be more commercially-minded and become seen as a key export of the UK economy. The second was the announcement of New Horizons, a five-year-plan announced by the British Film Institute which will see £285m of National Lottery money injected into British film.

Both the Smith Report and New Horizons have a certain amount of common sense in their contents and are written with the very best intentions. What is less certain is whether implementing them will have any positive effect on the British film industry, whether on home audiences or abroad. What is more worrying, the commercial emphasis of both projects creates a worrying sense of déjà vu for anyone who lived through...

Ken Loach expertly combines comedy with politics – and a drop of the hard stuff – in a warm, deftly-plotted heist movie

Though not generally considered a comedy director, Ken Loach has made films that have contained some of the funniest moments and sequences of the past 50 years, and he has regularly employed club comedians in serious roles (Crissy Rock in Ladybird Ladybird, John Bishop in Route Irish) and developed the talents of people such as Ricky Tomlinson not previously considered comics. It's just that Loach is a master of sudden, disturbing shifts of mood, and the comedy is embedded in works that are often deeply sad or tragic. The football game, for instance, that Brian Glover referees in Kes is at once hilariously funny and a brilliant study of bullying, bad education and humiliation that illuminates the film's larger context.

The background of The Angels' Share, his latest collaboration with the...

Oscar-winning drama about two British sprinters competing in the 1924 Paris Olympics is to be re-released on 13 July to celebrate London 2012

The Oscar-winning 1981 British film Chariots of Fire is to return to cinemas more than three decades on to celebrate the London Olympics.

Starring Ben Cross and Ian Charleson as British sprinters competing in the Paris Olympics of 1924, Hugh Hudson's drama won four Oscars at the 1981 Academy Awards, including best picture, best original screenplay, best costume design and best original music for Vangelis's stirring synth-fuelled score. Its victory is famous for screenwriter Colin Welland's speech while collecting his Oscar, in which he declared: "The British are coming".

The digitally restored Chariots of Fire will be re-released in more than 100 UK cinemas from 13 July with £150,000 in funding from the British Film Institute. It opens two weeks ahead of the London 2012 Olympics' opening ceremony. A previously mooted stage adaptation, Hudson's own idea,...

Few in the UK film industry want to shout about it but the evidence is clear. We are enjoying a renaissance in domestic cinema. Andrew Pulver reports on how audiences developed a taste for homegrown movies

Compared to theatre, cinema is an entirely portable medium – think what our view of film would be like if all we saw were British movies, with occasional touring productions of foreign work. No Hollywood blockbusters, no Korean ultra-violence, no Iranian minimalism. Nothing old, either – no Italian neorealism, or Czech new wave, or French poetic realism. Imagine what life for the British filmgoer would have been like, say, in 1978 – the highlight of your year would probably have been Death on the Nile, or Watership Down. And let's not forget the dark days of 1999 and 2000, when this paper felt compelled to trash the jaw-dropping wave of terrible British films in the wake of the lottery-fund bonanza.

After Sandra Hebron's nine years as artistic director, the BFI London film festival is enjoying record attendance and international acclaim. She tells Adam Dawtrey how it was done

For someone who describes her own taste in movies as "austere", Sandra Hebron certainly knows how to give audiences at the BFI London film festival a good time. Her nine-year reign as artistic director, which ends with the 55th edition, has coincided with the rising popularity of the event, an increase in glitz and red carpet glamour without ever compromising its commitment to serious cinema, and its transformation into a festival of genuine international stature.

Hebron, an elfin figure whose trademark knee-high black leather boots have their own fans, is leaving the festival on an all-time high, with last year's attendance a record 132,000, up 20% from when she took over in 2003. No wonder that the British Film Institute made sure to protect the...

Ryan Gosling shines as the man behind the wheel in Nicolas Winding Refn's gripping and lyrical take on Hollywood noir

Thirty years ago Colin Welland brandished his Chariots of Fire Oscar aloft at the Academy awards ceremony. Echoing the legendary words of Paul Revere to his fellow Bostonian colonials, he shouted: "The British are coming!" Similar hubris, one trusts, will not possess the current wave of Scandinavian filmmakers, though they might be forgiven for chanting: "The Vikings are coming!", that admonitory cry that once had the frightened denizens of our east coast lighting warning beacons and locking up their daughters. These past couple of weeks we've seen the Dane Lone Scherfig follow her British debut, An Education, with One Day, and Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish director of Let the Right One In, cross the North Sea to make his excellent version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Now another Dane,...

DVD Playhouse—September 2011

By Allen Gardner

In A Better World (Sony) Winner of last year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, this Danish export looks at two fractured families and the effect that the adult world dysfunction has on their two sons, who form an immediate and potentially deadly bond. Director Susanne Bier delivers another powerful work that maintains its drive during the films’ first 2/3, then falters somewhat during the last act. Still, well-worth seeing, and beautifully made. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Deleted scenes; Commentary by Bier and editor Pernille Bech Christensen; Interview with Bier. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS-hd 5.1 surround.

X-men First Class (20th Century Fox) “Origins” film set in the early 1960s, traces the beginnings of Magento and Professor X (played ably here by Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy), and how the once-close friends and colleagues became bitter enemies. First half is slam-bang entertainment at its stylish best,...

Back on the big screen in a new print that serves well the excellent naturalistic photography by Chris Menges (whose first feature film this was), the 75-year-old Loach's 1969 masterpiece of social criticism and humanist cinema is at the centre of the current well-deserved celebration of his 50 years as a film-maker. David Bradley is wonderful as the semi-literate Yorkshire schoolboy from a sink estate who shows up the inadequacy of the educational system by mastering a complex book on falconry to train a kestrel that becomes a symbol of freedom and spiritual affirmation in a world of cruelty and willed indifference. The bird's destruction and burial are as tragic, affecting and socially meaningful as anything in 20th-century art. I note new riches every time I see this film (for example, the noble kestrel is found nesting high in an old ruin from pre-industrial days), as well as happily revisiting such familiar ones as the contrasted teachers,...

Jane Eyre (PG)

(Cary Fukunaga, 2010, UK/Us) Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell

It's customary with literary chestnuts like this to ask whether or not we really need another version. But would you rather have a remake of, say, Eat Pray Love? The power of the source material pulses anew here, thanks to some bold tweaks to the structure, elegantly restrained visuals, and, above all, two handsome, capable leads. And the mix between gothic gloom and slow-burning passion is just about right. So yes, we did need it.

Friends With Benefits (15)

(Will Gluck, 2011, Us) Justin Timberlake, Mila Kunis, Patricia Clarkson. 109 mins

A non-romcom that almost creams its pants trying to be contemporary (iPads, apps, flashmobs?). The vaunted sex-only pairing is an excuse to critique the old sugar-coated Hollywood formula, but witty dialogue aside, you know it's going to resort to it in the end.

A Lonely Place To Die (15)

(Julian Gilbey,...

Forty-two years on, Ken Loach's social-realist tragedy about a boy who trains a kestrel is still transcendentally powerful

Ken Loach's social-realist tragedy from 1969 looks more luminous, more impassioned than ever, a rich film of flesh and blood. Perhaps, 42 years on, now is the time to restore the co-authorial status of Barry Hines, who adapted his own novel and gave Loach such a great story to work with. Non-professional David Bradley plays Billy Casper, the lad with the unforgettably pinched, shrewd, hungry face at the Barnsley comp where brutal teachers cane kids for things they haven't done. The poster famously shows Billy flicking a V-sign, but that's something he never does in the film, his defiance being more complex. Billy discovers a wild kestrel and realises he can train it: like a Tudor emblem of underdog ambition and power. The scene where Colin Welland's kindly teacher coaxes him...

Decades of rainy-Sunday screenings have blinded us to the true nature of postwar British cinema – freedom, naughtiness and a very black humour indeed

It begins with a parrot and a gaucho band. We're in South America – or a tiny patch of it, conjured some 60 years ago on a sound stage in London. The customers wear fur wraps and hair cream. The Atlantic stands, suspiciously immobile, beyond the window. And here is Alec Guinness, a British robber in rich retirement, sitting at a table, grinning a complacent grin and declaring his attachment to the Latin high life in that thin, high, gurgling voice. He is a prototypical Ronnie Biggs – and he's prepared to put his money where his mouth is.

When a conspicuously privileged middle-aged woman stops to talk, Guinness presses a roll of banknotes into her outstretched hands – a donation for the "victims of the revolution". A waiter receives a similarly thick wad of beneficence.

Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson 30 years ago and featuring Colin Welland's landmark screenplay, is still top of my podium when it comes to sport on the big screen

Radio 5 Live has been excelling itself with some reflective features far from the madding crowd of its usual breathless hurly-burly. Acclaim for Steve Bunce's revealing monograph of the recent Amir Khan contest was followed last week by The Glasgow School, a fascinating study of Glasgow football managers' extraordinary domination of England's Premier League, and a telling homage to the boxing film Raging Bull, in which both leading protagonists, actor Robert de Niro and director Martin Scorsese, persuasively relived their input.

The producers and crucial backroom gang at Radio 5 too often modestly decline to give themselves a credit; the latter two features were both presented by the excellent Mark Chapman, an appealingly lucid enthusiast, who let George Graham and...

Kes Quick Thoughts:

Just who is Ken Loach? What are his films about? Why is he so highly regarded? Honestly, I can't answer these questions without any great amount of knowledge, but after watching Criterion's treatment of Loach's second feature film, Kes, I'm beginning to have a greater understanding of the man and why Loach has remained a director appreciated by many since the mid-1960s.

Last year at the Cannes Film Festival I saw my first Ken Loach film, Route Irish. Kes was my second, and considering the British Film Institute named it the seventh best British film of the century my expectations were quite high.

To begin with, you are most likely going to want to turn on the subtitles for this one. The Yorkshire accents are so strong in the opening scene I couldn't understand a word. Things improve as you go along, but the dialect adds to the difficulty.

New movie about the great 80s rivalry between Olympic champions Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe aims to be in cinemas in time for the 2012 Games in London

The last time a British film about a celebrated Olympic track rivalry hit the headlines around the world was in 1982, when Chariots of Fire writer Colin Welland made his famous "The British are coming!" speech in celebration of the film's four Academy Awards. Now a new homegrown effort hopes to repeat that feat by focusing on the famous competition between Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe at the Moscow and La Olympics.

As yet, the movie has no title and no director, but it does have a writer. La-based Brit William Davies, who penned the animated tale Flushed Away, the Rowan Atkinson spy spoof Johnny English and the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Danny Devito 80s comedy Twins, has been hired to work on the screenplay.