Film – Wimbledon Film Club

Pretty Red Dress

Debut feature from writer and director Dionne Edwards, who chooses the inner city streets of South London as a backdrop to her complex exploration of black masculinity and self acceptance. Travis, recently released from prison, strives to reintegrate himself into family life but as secrets and desires surface, his life unravels. This moving drama is…
Official Competition

Argentine directing duo Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn brings together two of Spain’s most famous actors: Penelope Cruz (Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner for Woody Allen’s Vicki Cristina Barcelona), plays indie darling director Lola Cuevas; Pedro Almodovar’s ‘male muse’, Antonio Banderas (Cannes Best Actor winner for Pain and Glory) the film star Felix Rivero. While…
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…
The Worst Person in the World

Norway isn’t generally associated with romantic comedies, and the fact that the film features some genuinely upsetting moments for its characters might belie the categorisation, but Joachim Trier’s film delivers on the genre promise due to a sparkling performance by Renate Reinsve as Julie (echoes here of Strindberg’s Miss Julie), a character that at times…
Paris, 13th District

Émilie meets Camille, who is attracted to Nora, who crosses paths with Amber … while they all try to figure out what to do with their lives.
Breathless

A classic of the French New Wave, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) was Godard’s debut feature film, a career breakthrough for Belmondo and a career recovery for Seberg after her travails in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse.
Wildfire

The reference to the wider Troubles is clear enough, but this is really a film about frayed relationships and the oppressive legacy of families
The Personal History of David Copperfield

Dickens’ works tend to be adapted as serials, which is how he wrote them; the last cinema version of David Copperfield appeared over 50 years ago. The format imposes difficult choices: what to include, compress or omit? how to handle the novel’s first-person narrative and autobiographic perspective? Blackwell and Iannucci are both Dickens enthusiasts, and…
Closely Observed Trains

Oscar-winning comedy-drama from Czech New Wave director and actor Ji?í Menzel (Larks on a String, I served the King of England). Set in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during WWII, a shy clerk at a village train station fails in his first attempt at making-love, leaving him feeling inadequate and despondent, but eventually succeeds beyond his or anyone’s…
The Pawnbroker

Rod Steiger (On the Waterfront, Dr Zhivago, In the Heat of the Night) launched a stellar career as a serious actor with his Oscar-nominated performance as an embittered concentration camp survivor running a pawnshop in 1960s Harlem. A powerful drama from director Sidney Lumet, who made some of Hollywood’s most visionary political/social dramas (12 Angry…