Loving Vincent

Year of Release:  2017

Director:  Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman

Screenplay:  Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman and Jacek Dehnel

Starring:  Douglas Booth, Robert Gulaczyk, Jerome Flynn, Saoirse Ronan, Helen McCrory, Chris O'Dowd, John Sessions, Eleanor Tomlinson, Aidan Turner

Running Time:  95 minutes

Genre:  Animated, biography

In 1891, one year after the death of artist Vincent van Gogh, postman Joseph Roulin (O'Dowd) asks his son, Armand (Booth), to deliver a letter Vincent had written to his brother, Theo. Armand, who disliked Vincent, reluctantly agrees.  Discovering that Theo himself died  six months after Vincent, Armand continues to the town where Vincent spent his last days, in the hope of finding someone who may be able to send the letter to the van Gogh family.  However, as he learns more about Vincent's troubled life and tragic death, Armand's perspective on him begins to change.

While not achieving much success in his short life, Vincent van Gogh is now recognised as one of the greatest artists of all time.  In this film, the main character Armand is trying to find someone to deliver a letter to,  In doing so he meets a number of Van Gogh's acquaintances, friends and enemies who tell him about the great man's life and personality, and episodes from Vincent's life are depicted in flashback.  The film itself was in production for six years, and employed a team of 125 artists to render each one of it's 65,000 frames as an oil painting on canvas using the same techniques that Van Gogh himself used, and using Van Gogh's paintings as models for each scene and character.  The result is an astonishing achievement, making Van Gogh's art live and breathe.  The film employed a technique called "rotoscoping" in which rather than just supplying the voices for the characters, the actors performed their scenes as if it was live action, and then the artists painted over each frame.  It makes for a striking and slightly disorientating fusion of animation and live action.  At times the film seems unsure as to whether the main focus is Armand's quest or Van Gogh's life, as it begins to become almost a mystery story in it's second half, as Armand becomes convinced that there is more to Van Gogh's death than meets the eye, which threatens to make the film less interesting, as Vincent's friend, Marguerite (played by Saoirse Ronan) says in the film: "You want to know so. much about his death, but what do you know of his life?"  And of course life must always be far more interesting than death.  However, the film dies ultimately manage to pull back from this, and it is a powerful and beautiful experience.

Douglas Booth in Loving Vincent
  

The Woman in Black: Angel of Death

Year of Release:  2014

Director:  Tom Harper

Screenplay:  Jon Croker, from a story by Susan Hill

Starring:  Phoebe Fox, Jeremy Irvine, Helen McCrory, Adrian Rawlins, Leanne Best, Ned Dennehy, Oaklee Pendergast

Running Time:  98 minutes

Genre:  Horror

England, 1941: The second year of the Second World War and London suffers under the Blitz, a heavy bombing campaign carried out by German planes.  Teachers Eve Parkins (Fox) and Jean Hogg (McCrory) evacuate a number of children from the city to the relative safety of the country.  They are billeted in the large decaying mansion known as Eel Marsh House, in the middle of a vast, desolate stretch of marshlands.  However, Eel Marsh House is haunted by the malevolent, ghostly "Woman in Black" (Best) who begins targeting the children, particularly the silent, traumatised Edward (Pendergast).

This is the sequel to the 2012 film The Woman in Black, but it has no connection to it's predecessor at all, aside from the titular Woman in Black and the setting of Eel Marsh House, in fact this film is set 40 years after the first.  However Susan Hill, the author of the original 1983 novel The Woman in Black, did work on the story for this sequel.  This is atmospheric enough but it's not really particularly scary at all.  There are a few effective jump scares, but there is nothing here that fans of ghost stories have not seen many times before. The performances are good, particularly from Phoebe Fox as the troubled teacher and Helen McCrory as the stern headteacher.  Jeremy Irvine has charisma as the dashing pilot, with, of course, a troubled past, who romances Eve.  Eel Marsh House is satisfactorily creepy and dismal, and the acres of flat misty marshland make for a bleak, gloomy location which works for the material, and, as so often happens in these films, all the colours look as if they have been washed out.  The Woman in Black herself doesn't really appear that much, but makes herself known in a few effective scenes.  It's not really a very bad film, it's just very predictable, unoriginal and really not very frightening.  Although it is very bleak, and the fact that the Woman in Black targets young children might be upsetting for some viewers. 

She's behind you:  The Woman in Black (Leanne Best) approaches Eve (Phoebe Fox) in The Woman in Black: Angel of Death

Enduring Love

 Year of Release:  2004

Director:  Roger Michell

Screenplay:  Joe Penhall, based on the novel Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

Starring:  Daniel Craig, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Morton, Bill Nighy, Susan Lynch

Running Time:  100 minutes

Genre:  Drama, thriller

University professor and author Joe (Craig) is having a picnic in the Oxfordshire countryside with his partner Claire (Morton) when he becomes involved with an attempt to rescue a young boy from an out of control hot air balloon, alongside several other men.  The attempt fails, and one of the men dies, although the boy ultimately lands safely.  Joe suffers a great deal of guilt over the man's death.  Later he is contacted by Jed (Ifans) one of the other would-be rescuers.  Jed has become obsessed with Joe, and is convinced that Joe is in love with him.  Initially Joe tries to gently brush Jed off, but the stalking soon  intensifies to increasingly dangerous levels.

Based on a novel by acclaimed author Ian McEwan, who is probably best known for the 2001 novel Atonement, this is really in it's basic plot a conventional psycho-thriller about stalking, but it is dressed up as an arthouse drama.  It's all very elegant and moves at a stately pace, and there are many long conversations about guilt and the nature of love (Joe lectures and writes about love and his conviction that it doesn't really exist and is just a biological impulse).  It's only really until the end that it moves fully into thriller territory.  The film doesn't really work as a thriller because there is never any feeling of threat from Jed, at least until the end.  There is never any sense that Joe is scared of Jed.  He seems to regard him at first as an irritation, and later as an annoyance.  In fact there is the sense that Joe is more likely to turn violent against his stalker than the other way around.  It's very much a respectable, serious British film, that has the lurid elements that appeal to more mainstream audiences and the somber philosophising and arthouse elements to appeal to more serious minded viewers.  The film is very well acted, with Daniel Craig in particular turning from polite, mild-mannered professor into a seething self-destructive cauldron of barely repressed rage.  Rhys Ifans makes the stalker, Jed, disturbing but also weirdly sympathetic.  Samantha Morton is good but underused as sculptor Claire, Joe's increasingly put-upon partner.  The rest of the cast is full of familiar British actors including Bill Nighy, Susan Lynch, Helen McCrory, Andrew Lincoln (from The Walking Dead (2010-2021)), Anna Maxwell Martin, Corin Redgrave, and Daniel Craig's future James Bond co-star Ben Wishaw.  Not exciting or tense enough to work as a thriller, or particularly involving as a drama, the film feels stretched even at a fairly brisk running time, but the performances are fantastic, it all looks beautiful and, despite it's flaws, it is interesting enough to see how it all turns out.

Rhys Ifans and Daniel Craig in Enduring Love