Fashion designer Alexander McQueen experienced a spectacular but tragic rise and fall. The working class son of a taxi driver, McQueen rose rapidly from an apprentice on London’s prestigious Savile Row, where his clients included Prince Charles and Mikhael Gorbachev, where he soon developed a reputation for his immaculate tailoring skills. He would go on to design the wardrobe for David Bowie’s 1996-1997 tours, including the Union Jack coat worn by Bowie on the 'Earthling' album cover. As he developed another reputation as the fashion world’s enfant terrible, he would go on to become head designer at Givenchy, before launching his own self-named label. He was famous for his unconventional, highly stylised and theatrical fashion shows. Openly gay, McQueen’s growing fame and fortune also witnessed an increase in drug dependence as well as a slew of failed relationships. He committed suicide in 2010, nine days after his mother Joyce had died of cancer.
Based on Andrew Wilson's biography 'Blood Beneath the Skin', the film follows McQueen and his creative process in the months leading up to his 2009 show where he stunningly re-worked his greatest designs from the past 15 years, providing an intimate portrait of the man behind the brand and a celebration of the genius whose designs were just as much art as fashion.
Summertime, 1994. In a quiet mining village just outside Doncaster, a rumour stirs about the legend of a giant carp in the nearby decoy ponds. Trevor takes watch one night at the water’s edge. The following night, he decides to lead a brigade of young friends and neighbours on a fishing expedition. In a world of broken families, cassette tapes and rumbling political fever, these friends, each with their own struggles to bear, share a moment of harmony as they witness the carp for themselves that they will never forget.
Joseph and Celice Adkins first fell in love as zoology students on a field trip to Baritone Bay. Thirty years later, on a nostalgic trip back to the dunes where they first made love, they’re brutally murdered. With the crime scene undiscovered for days, we shift back and forth in time, travelling through their lives from their early romance, to the day their bodies are finally found caught in one final embrace.
A bittersweet look at loss, the way fate shapes our lives and a mesmerising vision of the power of love to endure.
Glasgow, Scotland. 1980s. Middle class Rosanna is 17 years-old. Her parents made their money in the mining industry which is now beginning to decline with the rise of Thatcherism. When Rosanna falls in love with a boy from a working class family, they bond over their shared taste of music and realise they're more similar than they expected.
If you’re going to get involved with men in the town of Dromord, they might as well be Mannions – and Sara is involved with them up to her neck.
She’s married to Daddy Mannion, 20 years her senior and runs the town. But her first love is his estranged son, Doggy Mannion, a recluse living in the woods. Then there’s the younger brother, Martin Mannion, a small-town Lothario and yes, Sara has just got involved with him too. As a result of this tangled web, the Mannion men have been set at each other. Their long truce cannot hold. Will we get through the next few days without bloodshed?
Preston is an indecisive film school lecturer who dreams of being a great film director like the European directors whose work he teaches - Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Antonioni, Godard and Buñuel. One day his wife leaves him, telling him that she believes he will never be anything more than a teacher.
Depressed, Preston is visited by the ghost of Ingmar Bergman who tells him to use his misery as the material for a great film just as he did in his 'Scenes from a Marriage'. Taking Bergman’s advice, Preston decides to make a film, in an attempt to prove his wife wrong and in the hope of winning her back.
Using the facilties of the school and the students as his crew, Preston shoots his film but soon finds that he is visited by the ghosts of series of famous, dead European directors who offer him advice on how to improve his film. Following their wise but disparate counsel his film goes wildly out of control and becomes a huge, sprawling, incoherent mess.
This comic fable about the creative process is a hymn to European filmaking - an 'Eight & a Half' meets 'Play It Again, Sam' for modern times.
Simon, a powerful psychic, has seen his future - a serial killer will torture him to death. He has just five days to change the future. If he can.
This isn’t the first time the psychic and the psychopath have met. As a boy Simon had another vision – of the killer slaughtering his best friend. Simon couldn’t stop that crime, and the tragedy turned him into a coward, unable to really use his powers.
In the present, Simon hires a troubled ex-SAS soldier as a bodyguard. But when MI5 intervene and try to grab Simon for their own nefarious purposes, the plan goes awry. With the bodyguard out of action, the killer murders his way closer and closer to Simon.
In the killer’s secret lair, Simon is at the point of excruciating death. Will he finally realise the true extent of his powers – and how to use them to save his own life?
In post-war England, journalist Stephen Underwood is keen to prove his worth. Working for a local newspaper he spends his days covering weddings and funerals while always on the lookout for a story that will catapult him into the big league. When he comes across the suicide of a Polish soldier from a nearby Displaced Persons Camp his journalistic instincts kick in, sensing something isn’t quite right, and his first port of call is to question Colonel Janusz Pietrowski, a Liaison Officer for the re-settlement of Polish troops under British command. Their meeting leaves Stephen unsettled – something just doesn’t quite ring true.
Stephen’s lover is Jeanette Mitchell, a Junior Commander in the Auxiliary Territorial Service working under Captain John Underwood, Stephen’s brother. Trapped in a marriage of convenience with a military intelligence officer, she shares Stephen’s dream of escape. It is during one of their clandestine meetings that Stephen witnesses a confrontation between a local farmer and Michael Loboda, a new arrival at the Camp, during which Loboda lets slip that he is Russian... not Polish.
Sensing a twist, Stephen questions Loboda to find out why he is posing as a Polish refugee. Loboda reacts aggressively but tries to give nothing further away. Later, unbeknownst to Loboda, Stephen discovers he is hiding a small cash-box containing a blood stained diary...
From here, Stephen’s investigation escalates as he finds himself embroiled in a dangerous, multi-layered conspiracy concerning the execution of 22,000 Polish military and civilians by Stalin’s secret police.
This is a fictional re-imagining of a bloody, heart-breaking, true tale. One that has been covered up for far too long.
A twentysomething postman knows all the secrets of the residents in a rural village after years of rifling through their letters. When a wealthy family relocates to the area from London, he soon discovers the real reason for their move and a growing obsession leads to an eventual bloody showdown.
A quintessential British village story.
Based on the inspirational true adventure of 1930's New York socialite Ruth Harkness, the first person ever to bring a live giant panda out of China and to the world's attention.
When Ruth loses her wealthy explorer husband unexpectedly, she takes over his expedition to China. Ignoring the dictates of society, she joins forces with an unproven but dashing Chinese guide, Quentin Young. They travel down the Yangtze and deep into the uncharted Himalayas, where, against all odds, they rescue an orphaned baby panda. When Ruth takes it back to the US, she creates a nationwide sensation, "Pandamonium!" but before long she realizes these incredible animals are best preserved in their natural habitat.
Quan, an ex-Viet Cong fighter, has escaped to the United Kingdom with his daughter and become the proud owner of the Double Happiness Chinese Takeaway. He has quietly started settling into middle age - until a resurgent IRA bomb rips through a Knightsbridge store, killing his daughter instantly. Heartbroken, Quan asks the authorities for justice. But when the authorities fob him off, Quan decides to take matters into his own hands, and travels to Ireland to extract revenge.
However, the bombings are the work of an unsanctioned IRA unit, operating against the wishes of the now-retired IRA old guard, or at least, most of them. Determined to find out who is behind the bombings, one of the ex-IRA leaders, Liam Hennessy, sets a trap for the splinter unit. Amidst the politics, lies and double-crosses, Quan and Hennessy find themselves fighting against each other, but with the same aim: to bring the bombers to justice.
Adaptation of Stephen Leather's best-selling novel 'The Chinaman'.
