25th Anniversary: Danny Boyle's "Shallow Grave"

by Anna

Twenty-five years, a new British filmmaker made a dark splash at Cannes. Danny Boyle’s directorial debut Shallow Grave, which would become a significant sleeper success in 1995, opens with flatmates David (Christopher Eccleston), Juliet (Kerry Fox) and Alex (Ewan McGregor) looking for a new boarder (and subsequently trolling the prospective candidates). They settle on Hugo (Keith Allen) but he dies from a drug overdose within hours of moving in. Then the trio  find a suitcase full of money under Hugo’s bed, and that’s where the plot (and the meaning behind the film’s title) really kicks off.

Roughly a decade of award-winning films from the likes of Stephen Frears and David Attenborough, Boyle came and turned British cinema as a whole on its ear...

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Review: Alison Maclean Returns with 'The Rehearsal'

By Glenn Dunks

Alison Maclean is not a prolific filmmaker. While her resume is littered with TV (Sex and the City, The Tudors), music videos (Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”) and short films (the superb domestic horror Kitchen Sink, and a segment in Subway Tales), films are few and far between. Her third feature is The Rehearsal and if its release feels awfully quiet then you can probably thank the near 20-year gap between feature projects and her return to her native New Zealand with a thorny film about tricky subject matter and written with a sense of ambiguous mystery.

My knowledge of New Zealand cinema is by far not as thorough as Australian film, but Maclean’s Crush is perhaps my favourite from there that isn’t Heavenly Creatures or The Piano. It is a film rife for rediscovery, not least of all for the delicious performance by Marcia Gay Harden at its centre (it also competed for the 1992 Palme d’Or). I was less enamoured by Jesus’ Son, a film that I assume stuck too closely to the often chaotic and episodic short story structure of its source novel to find its own groove, although Maclean’s experiences in the vast expanses of New Zealand and Canada gives her a unique advantage in framing the emptiness of the American mid-west and finding idiosyncrasies for her characters.

The Rehearsal is a much different style of film. It’s smaller in scope in terms of its core narrative, less tied to and reliant on its location and a sprawling need for its characters to escape whatever it is that nevertheless confines them to their place in life.

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