When it world-premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival this year, Honest was the centre of a frenzy of tabloid gossip and media spin. The reason? Its stars Nicole and Natalie Appleton and Melanie Blatt, are perhaps better known as three of the winsome quartet that make up the award-winning girl band All Saints. That the film also marked the directing debut of Eurythmics frontman Dave Stewart, here preferring to go under the moniker David A Stewart, further fuelled the hype.
Written by the duo responsible for a string of hits including Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, Porridge and The Commitments, Honest is an edgy black comedy set in late 1960s swinging London. The All Saints girls play streetwise sisters from the East End who have a lucrative sideline in armed robbery which they carry out dressed as men. Moving between the grime and gloom of their home turf, the neon lights of swinging Carnaby Street and the drug-fuelled sleaze of the decadent aristocracy, the sisters soon find themselves on the run when their latest heist brings them up against a local underworld boss (Corin Redgrave).
The cynical film world, hardnosed critics in particular, were ready to dismiss the film as a vanity project for all concerned, but its breezy energy and charismatic performances from its three lead newcomers laid such prejudices to rest. If there was one thing working against the film when it was released in the UK in May, it was its 18 certificate, which prevented the bulk of the singers' pre-teen fans from seeing it.
Set amidst the Carnaby Street, 'happenings' and hippie atmosphere of swinging 60s in London, Honest follows the escapades of three gun-toting, thieving sisters on a collision course with the world of peace, love and happiness.
The Chase sisters Gerry (Nicole Appleton), Mandy (Natalie Appleton) and Jo (Melanie Blatt) are a tight knit team: East End girls with an attitude and aura of energy and liberation. Unbeknownst to anyone, they've begun to burgle and thieve, masquerading behind iconic masks to conceal their feminine beauty. These disguised bandits not only challenge the law, but they threaten the 'old boy' code of the underworld gangs in East London. A world inhabited by their father, Tommy (James Cosmo), whose spirit has been crippled by a past tragedy.
In spite of a cast list boasting Toni Collette, Daniel Craig, Katrin Cartlidge and Stephen Tompkinson, the real star of Hotel Splendide is the hotel itself. Director Terence Gross and his team spent more than a year searching for the perfect location. They finally found it in the Slieve Donard Hotel in Northern Ireland. "It had all the qualities we were looking for - a fairy tale element, a hint of gothic and was overwhelmingly big to dwarf the staff and guests," says producer Ildiko Kemeny.
Gross sees the Hotel Splendide as embodying the spirit of Mrs Blanche, the late matriarch of the family who still manages the crumbling establishment. "She created a very ingenious heating system that runs off human waste. After her death she has had herself cremated into it and has a kind of presence in the hotel," explains Gross. "It's very Oedipal, with the children still living inside her."
Although the film has what Cartlidge describes as "a European sniff about it" ("it's very unusual for a British film to veer away from naturalism," she says) Gross sees it as carrying a very British message. "The whole film is a metaphor for the way the British settle for less and feel that mediocrity is better than risk," he says. But if that sounds portentous, it is also leavened with an essentially British sense of humour, as outsider Kath (Collette) brings liberating chaos into the suffocating environment of the hotel.
The film, which is Gross's feature debut, was selected for this year's Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section.
Set on a remote island off the coast, Hotel Splendide follows the Blanche family's attempts to maintain a crumbling, dilapidated hotel and health spa following the death of the family matriarch. Under his mother's tutelage, Ronald Blanche has been instructed in the art of a healthy Regime, based on boiling everything within an inch of its life.
His sister Cora runs a treatment room where services consist solely of mud baths and enemas, and Dezmond Blanche, determined to keep the spirit of his mother alive, is leading the hotel into ruinous straits. Into this bizarre universe bursts Kath, Ronald's erstwhile sous-chef and lover, banished from the island by his mother. Behind the peeling façade a gastronomical competition ensues, and as tensions and emotions mount, the hotel takes on a life of its own . . .
A tale of bingo hall rivalry set in the Welsh Valleys, House! stars Kelly Macdonald as Linda, a young bingo addict with a gift for guessing the numbers before they come up. When a new mega bingo arena under construction a mile up the valley threatens to close down her beloved Scala bingo hall, she tries to use her powers to save it, with comic results.
Jason Sutton's screenplay for the film received a reading at the Television Arts Performance Showcase in 1998 where first-time feature director Julian Kemp saw it and was immediately struck by its cinematic potential. "It was really funny and tapped into the humour of South Wales," he says. Kemp showed the script to producer Michael Kelk, with whom he had previously worked on children's television programmes, after which Kelk optioned the rights to the script. The next step was casting. Kemp says: "For Linda, we needed someone who was in their early 20s, who had real vitality and who could believably come from a small Welsh town. Surprisingly that turned out to be quite a short list and Kelly was at the top of it."
Kemp took the unusual step of recruiting Kjell Vassdal, a Norwegian director of photography to capture Wales on film. "I saw a fabulous Norwegian film called Junkmail in which the weather is very bad, but Kjell made it look spectacular. I thought if he can make Oslo look great, he can make Cardiff look great, and he did."
The film was released in the UK earlier this year.
Linda is devastated. La Scala, her wonderful bingo hall, is caught in the pincers of development. The council has finally noticed the decay and deterioration and are threatening demolition. And worse: A mile up the valley, Mega Pleasure has been built. The UK's biggest bingo arena. A stream of villagers begin the pilgrimage: the chance to play in the new National Bonanza game and win a million quid. Gavin, the charismatic caller and Linda's lover-elect, soon follows, lured by untold riches and natural fibres. Mr Anzani, Linda's friend, mentor and boss, is distraught. His family of Welsh-Italians have held the hall, in many guises, for over three generations. Is his to be the last?
But Linda discovers she has a gift: she can guess the numbers before they're called. She can decide who wins the games. The pathway to salvation is clear - everyone comes to the lucky hall. But who should she gift the million to? In desperation she seeks her auntie Beth's advice. 'Leave it well alone' is Beth's advice, telling Linda that her (recently deceased) Mother had the same strange abilities. But Linda doesn't leave it and soon finds that some gifts are best left unwrapped.
Human Traffic focuses on the lives and loves of five friends - JIP (played by John Simm), LULU (Lorraine Pilkington), KOOP (Shaun Parkes), NINA (Nicola Reynolds) and MOFF (Danny Dyer) --who suffer their weekday jobs to 'live it large' at the weekends.
Jip and Lulu are having relationship problems: Jip is insecure after failing to perform during several one night stands and Lulu's talent for picking the wrong bloke is getting her down. Nina and Koop have a great relationship - except he doesn't trust her, and Moff, their friendly dealer, is heading for a fast burn out.
Beneath the heady cocktail of music, clubs, drugs and bullshit, Human Traffic is also a film about friendships.
Gregory is a fat lonely telesales specialist who never leaves his flat. His monotonous days are an endless cycle of sales speak, junk TV and constant bingeing. His only contact with the outside world in his doting sister, Rosemary, but their relationship is threatened when he meets Julia on a chat-line.
I Could Read the Sky a film about music, madness memory, love and loss, a haunting story of immigration.
I Could Read the Sky is adapted from the photographic novel of the same name which has been recently published to rave reviews and explores the sense of identity, loss and exile. It is the moving story of an old man living in a bedsit in London, remembering his life, growing up on the West coast of Ireland and his journey to London.
The film unravels the strange twisting drama of a working man's life. It moves from a decaying rural past to a vividly modern present, driven by a dynamic music soundtrack that draws from both, and a simple flowing lyrical story telling. It is the state of memory that the film evokes, not memory as re-enactment but as texture. The film gets to the essence of how we remember. Memory as fragments, as details and layers, memory that comes at you out of the dark. From behind closed eyes, with its abstractions of light and form and sudden moments of precise clarity, taking us on an inward, visually extraordinary labyrinthine journey to the film's end.
The film stars the acclaimed Irish writer Dermot Healy and includes cameos from actors Maria Doyle Kennedy, Brendan Coyle and Stephen Rea, writer Pat McCabe (Butcher Boy) and the author Timothy O'Grady and photographer Steve Pyke.
To re-vitalise his marriage, Lawrence uses CCTV to spy on his wife and place anonymous 'I Saw You' ads in the local paper. Should she meet this mysterious sender?
Max wants to learn to box, but his parents want him to stay a choirboy. After a beating from the local bullies, Max goes to a gym where he finds a vicious boxer.
