Genre: Drama – Page 16 – Wimbledon Film Club

My Cousin Rachel

Based on the famous 1951 novel by Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca, The Birds, Jamaica Inn), My Cousin Rachel tells the story of a young Englishman (Hunger Games’ Sam Claflin) who becomes involved with his older cousin’s widow, played by Rachel Weisz (who won an Oscar for her role in The Constant Gardener). Shot in England…

20th Century Women

With a superlative cast like this in the hands of Mills (Beginners, Beautiful Losers) such a sensitive nurturing director, nothing could go wrong. A five star comedy drama to relish as single mum Dorothea (Bening) has trouble raising her teenage son and engages the help of the other free-spirited women living in the house. Or…

My Pure Land

British-Pakistani director Sarmad Masud’s assured debut feature tells the fascinating true story of Nazo Dharejo (Suhaee Abro), a young woman who fought to save her home in Pakistan from bandits. Masud has said that he made the film “for Pakistan – our nation is struggling to find its voice in the cinema … we need…

The Florida Project

A double entendre, the title alludes to Walt Disney’s utopian plan to build The Florida Project, an “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” – subverted after his death, with vestiges incorporated in the lucrative Walt Disney World. Today, “project” is also the American term for council estates, which often have Disney-style names that jar with their…

Tom of Finland

Award-winning director Thomas ‘Dome’ Karukoski, one of Finland’s most successful film-makers, brings to the big screen the life, work and times, from the 1940s through the 1980s, of one man who influenced a generation – homoerotic artist Touko Laaksonen, aka Tom of Finland (Pekka Strang). Respected critic Markus Maattanen has described Dome Karukoski as “the…

The Servant

The first of three film collaborations with the American director Joseph Losey, Harold Pinter’s screenplay adapts a 1948 novel by Robin Maugham, pen name of the 2nd Viscount Maugham (1916–1981), the Eton-educated nephew of the novelist W. Somerset Maugham. Filmed in London during one of the coldest British winters on record, The Servant dissects the…

Things to Come

Hansen-Løve says she wrote the role of Nathalie with Huppert in mind, while the character was inspired by her own mother, a professor of Philosophy. The film accords as much importance to silence as to words; to the poetry of landscapes – from low tide in Brittany to the peaks of Vercours – as to…

Graduation

Leading light of the Romanian New Wave Cristian Mungiu (whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, also shown by WFC, won the 2007 Palme d’Or) directs this gripping morality tale starring Romanian stage and screen actor Adrian Titieni as Dr Romeo Aldea and Maria Dragus (the priest’s daughter in The White Ribbon) as his…

Lady Bird

Does the world need another coming-of-age story with a mother/daughter conflict? – When the director and cast are this talented, the answer is yes. Saoirse Ronan (24), in the title role, made her searing debut in Atonement. Schoolmates are played by Lucas Hedges (21) and Timothée Chalamet (22), outstanding in Manchester by the Sea and…

Written on the Wind

Based on a 1945 novel, Written on the Wind is a thinly-disguised account of a real-life scandal, with names, location and key details such as the source of the wealth of the family involved changed. Dismissed on release as glossy and over-the-top, its reputation has since grown along with that of its director Douglas Sirk,…