• The Favourite

    January 4, 2019 - By 

    Court is in session in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, a spectacular re-dressing of the period costume drama and savage comedy of manners about people who barely have any. It’s early 18th century England in Queen Anne’s palace. Off-screen, over on the mainland there’s a war with France to fund (there was always a war with France), but home is where the real hostilities are flaring up. Upstart crow Abigail Hill (Emma Stone at her most compelling) is the ruthless social climber cousin of the reigning royal favourite Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), the Cheney-like whisperer who basically runs the country for the…

  • My Cousin Rachel

    June 13, 2017 - By 

    The fiction of mid-century English author Daphne du Maurier has inspired some of cinema’s most sinister highlights, the most admired being Hitchcock’s Rebecca and The Birds. Written and directed by Roger Michell, this new adaptation of her 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel is the first film treatment since Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland’s romance a year after publication. Michell is maybe best known as the director of rom-com smash Notting Hill, and much of his work since, like frothy breakfast show comedy Morning Glory or Bill Murray’s FDR turn in Hyde Park on Hudson, has stuck to middle of…