The Problem with People, Lies We Tell, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger and Howard's End
For the last few years I have previewed festivals (large and small) for the RNZ website. I’d either select three or four titles from the programme, or have them selected for me by the organisers, and see what conclusions I could draw.
RNZ has decided they don’t want those anymore so I’ll see if I can make them work in the newsletter format. Apologies for those subscribers who are not in Aotearoa New Zealand. Hopefully these short reviews will be useful to you, one way or another, sooner or later.
The British and Irish Film Festival has grown in a short period to become one of the crucial events in the calendar. Distributors use it to promo big titles that will get a proper cinema release later in the year. Some titles are being tested to see what the audience response will be. And for some, this will be their only big screen outing.
Films in the first category seem fairly obvious and the festival has secured more of those than ever before. Conclave looks like it’s going to be an awards contender at the business end of the season. Somehow I have managed to become a big fan of papal intrigue – Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope and McCarten/Meirelles’ The Two Popes spring to mind – so this looks right up my alley.
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I signed an NDA so I can’t tell you that I’ve already seen We Live in Time or that I thought it was marvellous. New films by Andrea Arnold (Bird) and Mike Leigh (Hard Truths) are standouts and very, very fresh, as is Alice Lowe’s comedy Timestalker.
The titles I get to preview are usually among the less-heralded, though, and that’s the way I like it.

The Problem with People (Cottam, 2023)
This is an Irish crowd-pleaser with two well-known faces up front (Colm Meaney and Paul Reiser, who also co-wrote the screenplay).
Knowingly inspired by Yankee fish-out-of-water films like Local Hero, it sees New York property developer Barry (Reiser) invited by his cousin Ciáran (Meaney) to visit the old country and try and bridge the multi-generational divide that has kept the American and Irish sides of the family apart.
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An easygoing allegory about how stubbornness and misunderstandings can breed fresh discord, even while you’re trying to heal the old ones, the pleasure here is mainly in watching these veterans in action and in seeing how this sort of fiddle-dee-dee Irishness is being updated for the modern world. Same sex marriages and all that, to be sure.

Lies We Tell (Mulcahy, 2022)
I was less enamoured by this gothic horror – inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Uncle Silas – in which a rich orphan is terrorised by the people who have been assigned to her guardianship.
It’s partly the stilted and self-conscious Victorian-style dialogue and partly the performance inconsistencies from scene to scene, but I never felt like this one let me in – or particularly wanted to.

Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger (Hinton, 2024)
If you’ve ever been lucky enough to watch A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies – the great director’s epic contribution to the same ‘century of cinema’ series that brought us Sam Neill’s Cinema of Unease – you’ll already know how much pleasure and insight you can get from Scorsese talking about film.
In Made in England, he turns his attention to a different kind of ‘personal journey’, his unexpected relationship with the director Michael Powell and his appreciation for the ambitious and experimental movies Powell made with creative partner Emeric Pressburger in the 40s and 50s.
Lavishly illustrated, Scorsese’s history shows us what British cinema might have become if post-war cynicism, production austerity and kitchen sink drama hadn’t taken hold. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes are glorious but Scorsese also introduced me to two less well-known Powell/Pressburger films, A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I’m Going! Both were considerably less colourful (visually) but just as emotionally vivid, perhaps even more so.
I love that Scorsese isn’t afraid to laud technical achievement as well as artistic vision – Technicolor and VistaVision get specific shout-outs – and I always feel like I’m a smarter film watcher after spending time with the great man.

Howards End (Ivory, 1992)
Made in England isn’t the only film about filmmaking in the programme. I didn’t preview Merchant Ivory: The Documentary but I will take the opportunity to point you towards their two Emma Thompson/Anthony Hopkins classics in the schedule.
The Remains of the Day (1993) adapts Ishiguro and will look a picture on a big screen following a recent restoration. I’m going to take this opportunity to recycle my review of Howards End from earlier this year:
Judging and controlling behaviour is at the heart of Howards End. Wealthy businessman Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) seems to start every sentence with “My advice to you is …” and, at the other end of the scale, poor clerk Leonard Bast (Samuel West) is fatally constrained by his own sense of shame at not being able to provide for his wife Jacky (Nicola Duffett).
The Schle-gals (including Helena Bonham Carter as sister Helen) , the Wilcoxes and the Basts are thrown together by fate (and Forster) during that serene period in England where the modern world of the motor car and telegraph had arrived but World War One hadn’t.
The Schlegels are from a German emigré family and appreciate art and progressive politics. The Wilcoxes are becoming rich beyond measure thanks to their exploitation of African natural resources. And the Basts are tossed around by fate – “The poor are the poor. One is sorry for them, but there it is,” Henry famously says at one point.
The British and Irish Film Festival actually started yesterday (23 October) and runs until 13 November in multiple venues across the country.