The 2015/16 season in association with The Hive, featured some of the best recent films.
The films we have shown during this season include –
Suffragette (Cert 12, 106 mins):
100 years after smashing shop windows and blowing up letterboxes, the British suffragettes finally get a film they deserve. Writer Abi Morgan (‘Shame’, ‘The Iron Lady’) and director Sarah Gavron’s film makes the suffragettes’ dilemma feel immediate and real.
Suffragette is a solid historical drama, that tells an important social tale… a tale that graphically illustrates how much the world has really changed, and changed for the better, in a mere hundred years.
Brooklyn (Cert 12, 107 mins):
Adapted from Colm Tóibín’s award-winning novel by Nick Hornby, directed by John Crowley and starring Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters, this outstanding film set in the early 1950s, tugs at the heartstrings and is a “joy from start to finish.”*
Ronan plays the eighteen year old girl (Eilis) at the centre of this romantic drama who moves from small town Ireland to Brooklyn, New York. The film charts the first two years of her new life before a tragic event brings her back to her home town and she is forced to choose between two men, two jobs, two countries – in effect, two completely different lives. She does make the decision eventually but her reasons for doing so become all too clear.
The film was recently nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won the BAFTA for Best British Film.
* Brian Viner, The Daily Mail.
x + y (Cert 12, 111 mins): Was successfully screened on 22nd. January 2016. A comedy drama about a young, autistic maths whizz who begins to come out of his shell after being selected for an international maths festival.
Directed by Morgan Matthews, it stars a high calibre British cast including Asa Butterfield, Sally Hawkins, Rafe Spall and Eddie Marsan.
The Lunchbox (Cert PG, 104mins). We follow on with this wonderful Indian romantic drama. A mistaken delivery in Mumbai’s famously efficient lunchbox delivery system connects a young housewife to an older man in the dusk of his life as they build a fantasy world together through notes in the lunchbox.
Directed by Ritesh Batra, this largely subtitled film stars Irffan Khan, Nimrat Kaur and Nawazuddin Siddiqui.
The Lady In The Van (Cert 12A, 104 mins). Dame Maggie Smith, recreates one of her most celebrated roles – the singular Miss Shepherd – in Alan Bennett’s big-screen comedic adaptation of his own iconic memoir and stage play.
Directed by Nicholas Hytner, its based on the true story of Miss Shepherd, a woman of uncertain origins who “temporarily” parked her van in Bennett’s London driveway and proceeded to live there for 15 years. What began as a begrudged favour became a relationship that would change both their lives.
Also starring: Alex Jennings, Dominic Cooper, Jim Broadbent, Roger Allam
45 Years (Cert 15A, 95 mins). A sequence of events in the run up to a big celebration of the couple’s 45th anniversary. An unexpected letter with some unsettling news that pulls, just a little, at the seams of the marriage.
Scenic English countryside outside a historic market town. Accomplished performances by all of the cast. Charming British accents. Lovely camera work. Tight scripting & dialogs that brings out the affections and tensions of a long, childless marriage. All of this points to an engaging movie, and it is.
The Chorleywood Film Club 