★★★★
Don’t expect much by way of exuberance and joy from this year’s BAFTA shorts. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times? Released as a portmanteau feature this week, ahead of Sunday’s ceremony, the prospective live action and animated nominees are a strong grouping but even those that are not desperately sad come with a air of melancholia. There are eight in total and together they stretch to just over an hour and fifty minutes.
★★★★
Truth be told, but expressed with only the very best intention, All is True is terribly old fashioned. As Shakespearean biographical features go, it is twee, sycophantic and hardly more factual than Roland Emmerich’s ludicrously slanderous 2011 offering Anonymous. And yet, projected through the lush glow of Zac Nicholson’s eternally autumnal cinematography, it is a delightfully tender film. From open to close, in spite of dour and devastating plotting, a viewing feels equitable to the warmest of enveloping embraces.
★★
On paper, Mary Queen of Scots reads like a prestige picture par excellence. Saoirse Ronan leads, theatre stalwart Josie Rourke directs and the creator of Netflix hit House of Cards, Beau Willimon, writes. The reality is a much drier, less engaging and only sporadically compelling affair. Were hair and makeup alone enough to make a triumph, Rourke’s film would be nothing less. On the other hand, in such a world, Redken would be beating Disney at the box office.
The Film Blog 