I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming review – brilliant bulletin from Ukrainian frontline dives deep into culture war

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Locarno film festival A couple attempting to leave Ukraine when the war encounter gender identity issues in this bold and challenging film A movie’s themes could hardly be more urgent and contemporary than those on offer in this entirely absorbing film from German director Isabelle Stever and Ukrainian critic turned screenwriter Anna Melikova. It’s a bulletin from the frontline of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and from the culture war too. It is about identity and choices made in peacetime when less was at stake. There is a bold and brilliant premise that may at first look artificially satirical but is actually inspired. When Russia begins its attack, the crisis is very specific for a scared young Ukrainian couple, recently engaged: Olya (Tania Myronyshena) and Oleh (Markus Bright). As bombs rain down, they head west in the cramped car of Olya’s elderly mum and dad – with Olya grumpily objecting to her dad’s sexist comments from behind the wheel about female drivers – to stay with Olya’s si...
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Hugh Hudson: smash-hit pop classic Chariots of Fire director was a hero of British film

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Hudson brought an ad-man’s eye to the brilliant 1981 drama about athletics and bigotry, as well as directing the hilarious Cinzano commercials

As the 1980s dawned, British ad director Hugh Hudson took on his first feature film and made it a legendary hit: an inspirational story which supplied a sugar-rush of patriotism and a swoon of nostalgia which hit the spot both sides of the Atlantic. It somehow brought off the trick of being about the underdog and the victim of bigotry and religious discrimination – and yet also being a resounding endorsement of the status quo which could, on grounds of decency and meritocracy, always accommodate the outsider. This was the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the ethos of success for the hardworking and the deserving.

The film of course was Chariots of Fire, the true story of the 1924 Olympic runners Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross), a Jew who ran to defy prejudice, and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a devout Christian who found a creationist glory in his speed. It was the destiny of so many involved to be forever associated chiefly, or solely, with this smash-hit pop classic: certainly Cross and Charleson never again found roles to match Abrahams and Liddell. And maybe Hudson himself never again had a triumph like it: though he was no one-hit wonder, later directing the Oscar-winning Tarzan drama Greystoke, and later Revolution, an epic about the American revolution starring Al Pacino which was derided but then grew in acclaim, giving his Hudson his own misunderstood masterpiece moment.

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