‘Utterly overwhelmed’: British writer-director’s short film earns Oscar nod

Lee Knight says accolade for A Friend of Dorothy, based on friendship with neighbour, sends message to never give up A writer-director from Stanmore in Middlesex whose short film has been nominated for an Oscar has said he feels “utterly overwhelmed” by the accolade. Lee Knight’s film A Friend of Dorothy , starring Miriam Margolyes and Stephen Fry, is in the running for best live action short. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/e4cqUGs via IFTTT

Battleship Potemkin review – Eisenstein’s explosive movie still burns bright

With a new score by Pet Shop Boys, the Russian director’s masterpiece remains a stunning paean to revolution

Here for its hundred-year anniversary is a restored version of Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneering silent classic from 1925, itself commissioned for the 20-year anniversary of the events it showed and reimagined. It is in black-and-white of course, apart from the vivid red flag flown from the battleship’s mast. This rerelease is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Pet Shop Boys in 2005; it is a fervent, continuous score but not, for me, one that engages fully with the drama’s light-and-shade. It also perhaps reopens the debate about when and how a silent-movie musical accompaniment should be content to fall silent in favour of discreet ambient background sound.

The subject is a 1905 anti-Tsarist mutiny on an Imperial Russian Navy battleship in the Black Sea near Ukraine. It is an uprising of sailors demoralised by losses in the Russo-Japanese war, resentful of the officers’ arrogance and incompetence, electrified by news of revolutionary enthusiasms on land, and finally triggered by the maggot-infested meat they were expected to eat.

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