Country: USA – Wimbledon Film Club

The Lady Eve

Barbara Stanwyck shines in this hilarious revenge rom-com: a con woman sets her sights set on a likeable rich boob (Henry Fonda). One of the finest achievements of Golden Age Hollywood’s first writer-director, Preston Sturges.
Aftersun

Though widely described as a coming-of-age film, Aftersun is more accurately an essay in reflection as the adult Sophie (Rowlson-Hall) looks back on a holiday at a Turkish resort in the 1990s spent with her father, Calum (Mescal). While the wider circumstances are never fully explained, it’s clear that this was a pivotal moment for…
The Banshees of Inisherin

The setting of the film is obviously meant to represent a larger canvas. Inisherin literally translates as Island of Ireland. But this may be just one of many misdirections by Martin McDonagh who gleefully toys with the tropes of Irish history. Far from being a parable about the distantly-heard Civil War, this is a more…
The Doo Dah Man

The film features some of the classic tropes of American cinema, most obviously from the road-trip movie and the ill-assorted buddy movie, but this familiarity belies a more substantial story about fathers and sons, as well as a deeper literary tradition that goes back to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. A young man, Jake (Brittain), leaves…
A Foreign Affair

Billy Wilder has a filmography like none other. Between the mid-forties and early 60s, he directed such classics as Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, The Seven Year Itch, Witness For the Prosecution, Some Like it Hot, and The Apartment. Born 1906 in a small town near Vienna, Wilder spent eight years as a…
Minari

“Minari is a story of the American Dream. But Chung’s brilliance is in how he adds depth and complexity to those foundational ideas – it’s in the spaces in between that we find love, loss, hope, and regret.” Clarisse Loughrey, Independent
The Lighthouse

An hypnotic and hallucinatory tale of two lighthouse keepers trying to keep a grip on their sanity and humanity on a remote New England island in the 1890s. “As with The Witch, it’s the atmosphere that seeps into you like sea brine. You don’t watch this film, you are submerged in it.” Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, Metro…
The Big Heat

Police Sergeant Bannion is investigating the apparent suicide of a policeman, when he is suddenly ordered to stop. Bent coppers and systemic corruption drive this classic Hollywood noir, incisively directed by emigré Fritz Lang, visionary creator of the dystopian Metropolis and disturbing M. Essentially a 1950s B movie, The Big Heat has since attained enduring…
Queen & Slim

A Tinder date gone wrong is the springboard for a tense yet romantic road-trip evoking Bonnie & Clyde, set against the backdrop of contemporary racial injustices in the USA. It stars two Brits: Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya, born in London of Ugandan parents, who won the BAFTA Rising Star Award in 2018; and Jodie…
The Farewell

In 2013, Chinese-American director Lulu Wang was told that her grandmother (‘Nai Nai’ in Chinese) had Stage 4 lung cancer with three months to live. The family decided not to tell Nai Nai of the diagnosis and devised a ruse — a fast-tracked wedding in her hometown Changchun —for everyone to see her one last…