You can smell what’s happening in “Starve Acre” before you puzzle the rest of it out. The grassy, peaty dampness of its rural Yorkshire setting seems to hit the olfactory glands without any scratch-and-sniff assistance, only intensifying as the film unearths its literally deep-buried secrets. Daniel Kokotajlo’s impressive second feature unfolds in a vein of British folk horror that has been popular of late — with films from Ben Wheatley’s “A Field in England” to Mark Jenkins’s “Enys Men” all tapping into that retro “Wicker Man” eeriness — but rarely with such rattling sensory specificity or formal refinement. Starring Morfydd Clark and Matt Smith as former townies unprepared for the full burden of lore they inherit with their desolate farmhouse, it’s a tale of quite outlandish fantastical leaps, grounded by the chills it also finds in common weather and wildlife.
Premiering in the main competition at this year’s London Film Festival,...
Premiering in the main competition at this year’s London Film Festival,...
- 10/20/2023
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
With great success comes great expectation, and I doubt that Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre will quite live up to the favorable notices of his first feature, the BAFTA-nominated Apostasy. The story, which has been adapted from a novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, concerns Richard (Matt Smith) and Juliette Willoughby (Morfydd Clark), who have recently moved from the city to the comparatively desolate Yorkshire Dales. At the village fair, their son Owen, who has complained of hearing the voice and whistles of a sprite named Jack Grey, blinds a horse with a sharp stick and is duly sent to a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after his consultation, which includes a nightmarish brain scan, he dies suddenly at the family home, paralyzing Richard and Juliette and further enlivening the spirit that so tormented him.
It is here the film takes its boldest, most bewildering turn. After Owen’s death, Richard commits himself...
It is here the film takes its boldest, most bewildering turn. After Owen’s death, Richard commits himself...
- 10/16/2023
- by Oliver Weir
- The Film Stage
Director Peter Mackie Burns’ Rialto takes the stage play Trade by Mark O’ Halloran (who writes the screenplay here too) and reworks it into a feature, with equally insightful and emotive results. The title translates in english as ‘exchange’, and in this case that definition takes on multiple meanings.
Rialto picks up with 46-year-old dockyard worker Colm (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), who is married with kids and living comfortably but he is secretly gay, and the shame he feels, not to mention the increasingly changing direction of his life, all begin to consume him. However, in teenage sex worker Jay (Tom Glynn Carney) he finds some kind of connection but with potentially further devastating consequences.
Colm’s self-destructive decisions, spiralling addictions to alcohol, desperate clinging to his paid sex with Jay, increasing frictions at home and tough upbringing, all amount to a compelling but shattering, and sometimes harrowing, portrait of a troubled soul.
Rialto picks up with 46-year-old dockyard worker Colm (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), who is married with kids and living comfortably but he is secretly gay, and the shame he feels, not to mention the increasingly changing direction of his life, all begin to consume him. However, in teenage sex worker Jay (Tom Glynn Carney) he finds some kind of connection but with potentially further devastating consequences.
Colm’s self-destructive decisions, spiralling addictions to alcohol, desperate clinging to his paid sex with Jay, increasing frictions at home and tough upbringing, all amount to a compelling but shattering, and sometimes harrowing, portrait of a troubled soul.
- 10/17/2020
- by Jack Bottomley
- The Cultural Post
In “Rialto,” the sensitive if constrained sophomore feature from Peter Mackie Burns (“Daphne”), diffident Dubliner Colm (Tom Vaughn-Lawlor) apologizes a lot. When he bumps into someone. When someone bumps into him. When he answers the phone or forgets a household task or mishears his wife. All those little excuses are partly the accurate observation of an authentically Irish verbal tic, as detailed in Mark O’Halloran’s cleverly colloquial screenplay, based on his own stage play. But there is also the sense that Colm’s frequent exhalations of apology are flak cannon fire, sent up into the ether to disguise and distract from an enormous, deeply repressed guilt that there’s no “sorry” large enough to cover. “Rialto” pivots claustrophobically around a crisis moment that drives Colm to act on the very desires he has perhaps been apologizing for all along.
It is a comfortably-off family man, working in a...
It is a comfortably-off family man, working in a...
- 9/27/2019
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Filming has wrapped on writer-director Georgia Parris’ feature debut.
Screen can reveal a first look at Mari, the Film London Microwave feature starring acclaimed dancer Bobbi Jene Smith.
The project, which recently wrapped its shoot in Sherborne, Dorset and London, is the debut feature from writer-director Georgia Parris and producer Emma Duffy.
It was commissioned through Film London’s Microwave scheme, the low-budget feature initiative which is backed by the BFI and BBC Films, with support from Creative Skillset. Further backing came from Intermission and Boudica Films.
Mari, a drama with dance elements, also stars Phoebe Nicholls (The Elephant Man...
Screen can reveal a first look at Mari, the Film London Microwave feature starring acclaimed dancer Bobbi Jene Smith.
The project, which recently wrapped its shoot in Sherborne, Dorset and London, is the debut feature from writer-director Georgia Parris and producer Emma Duffy.
It was commissioned through Film London’s Microwave scheme, the low-budget feature initiative which is backed by the BFI and BBC Films, with support from Creative Skillset. Further backing came from Intermission and Boudica Films.
Mari, a drama with dance elements, also stars Phoebe Nicholls (The Elephant Man...
- 3/16/2018
- by Tom Grater
- ScreenDaily
A central scene in Apostasy, the powerful debut from British director Daniel Kokotajlo, has a group of kids stage a re-enactment of King Solomon’s judgment, the parable from the Book of Kings. In the story, the king concocts a plan to settle who is the true mother of young boy. He says he’ll cut the child in two, dividing it among the two women. The true mother, of course, is declared after she says she’ll give up the baby. The king knows this because no mother would kill her child.
The story echoes disturbingly through this compelling drama, set in a close-knit family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The clan’s beliefs mean they refuse hospital treatment (as seen in another fall festival picture, The Children Act), and the mother here places her trust in religion that could compromise her daughter’s life. The conflict at the heart...
The story echoes disturbingly through this compelling drama, set in a close-knit family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The clan’s beliefs mean they refuse hospital treatment (as seen in another fall festival picture, The Children Act), and the mother here places her trust in religion that could compromise her daughter’s life. The conflict at the heart...
- 10/16/2017
- by Ed Frankl
- The Film Stage
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.