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gregorywilliams
Reviews
Sami Sakhli (2009)
Great film - needs to be seen widely
I saw this film yesterday at the Georgian Film Festival at the Riverside Studios in London. It was amazing, especially the 2nd of the three parts. The film really makes great use - especially in this part - of beautifully shot, slow images and an amazing performance of the General's Wife. This film really haunts me. The film plot centres around a painting and the people who own it, or want to own it, over 100 or more years. Much of Georgian film foregrounds the countryside and the folk traditions, in this we get the Chekhovian countryside, a sort of Great Uncle Stalin, and just-modernising Tblisi, with drugs and crime and confusion.
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (2010)
Review of a great film about women
This superb film for TV deserves the widest possible audience: it tells a gripping and true human story that surprises all those like me who thought they know the era of Jane Austen. Maxine Peake acts out of her skin as Anne Lister, the lesbian diarist whose story remained hidden form the wider public until Helen Whitbread's groundbreaking 1992 book. The film is excellent on many levels: for its up-close portrayal of the emotional and sexual lives of (lesbian) women in an era when the concept of such love (and lust) was more or less unknown; for its sure-footed cinematography that creates a just-familiar-enough epoch; and for its wonderful script by Jane English. Apparently it took 18 days to make - unbelievable. Probably the best value drama for the licence money that BBC has ever achieved. Well done to whoever commissioned this. My favourite thing: the great way interior light and 30+something skin tones are worked: women shown as women rather than constructs of the advertising-consumer nexus. My least favourite thing: what happens to Anne's final partner after Anne dies.