Image from Wuthering Heights from imgur.com at https://imgur.com/gallery/fxjcK
Image from This is England from bfi.org.uk at https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-films-set-midlands
Image from Fish Tank from film-grab.com at https://film-grab.com/2019/06/04/fish-tank/#bwg1899/118456
Image from Hunger from wifflegif.com at https://wifflegif.com/gifs/424740-michael-fassbender-artists-on-tumblr-gif
Image from Ratcatcher from film-grab.com at https://film-grab.com/wp-content/uploads/photo-gallery/54%20(798).jpg?bwg=1547380046
Image from Kes from giphy.com at https://giphy.com/gifs/filmstruck-xTgeIFufdKgnZAQyrK
Image from Naked from film-grab.com at https://film-grab.com/2014/03/04/naked/#
Image from Meantime from trailersfromhell.com at https://trailersfromhell.com/meantime/
Image from A Taste of Honey from telegraph.co.uk at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-features/10594380/A-Taste-of-Honey-watershed-theatre.html
Selected Brit Realism Films
Image from Room at the Top from tumblr.com at https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/room+at+the+top
Alfie
A wild and ribald comedy, filled with sex and sin, about a successful London playwright who is also a shallow womanizer trying to figure out what life is all about.
Billy Liar
Billy Fisher, whose constant daydreams and truth-deficient stories earn him the nickname of "Billy Liar," dreams of escape from an unsympathetic, resolutely working-class family, a pair of demanding fiancees, and an insecure dead-end job at an undertakers.
Kes
A portrait of working-class Northern England. Billy is a fifteen-year-old miner's son whose close bond with a wild kestrel provides him with a spiritual escape from his dead-end life. Special features included.
The Leather Boys
Dot (Rita Tushingham) is a girl who marries motorcycle maven Reggie (Colin Campbell) to escape her parents' influence. The marriage gets off to a rocky start and completely slides downhill after the honeymoon is plagued by bad weather. Dot refuses to have anything to do with household responsibilities and cooks only canned beans. Reggie loses interest in sex with Dot because of her actions, and after moving in with his grandmother, he begins to hang around Pete (Dudley Sutton). The two friends ride their motorcycles and begin to spend even more time together, and eventually Reggie realizes that Pete is a homosexual. Dot tells Reggie she is pregnant in an attempt to get him back -- with no result, but when Reggie comes home to find his wife in bed with another man, he decides to go off to sea with Pete. Pete leaves Reggie shaken and alone when he goes off with a group of sailors out to satisfy their same-sex lust. The film was controversial at the time of its initial release. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi
Life Is Sweet
An amusing portrait of a working-class family in a suburb just north of London, an irrepressible mum and dad and their night-and-day twins, a bookish good girl and a sneering lay about. A vivid, lived-in story of ordinary existence, in which even modest dreams (such as the father's desire to open a food truck) carry enormous weight. Perched on the line between humor and melancholy.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Colin, a young rebel and promising distance runner, is chosen to represent his reform school in a track race. However, the opposition for Colin isn't another runner, it's the Establishment.
Meantime
A slow-burning depiction of economic degradation in Thatcher's England, Mike Leigh's 'Meantime' was the culmination of the writer-director's pioneering work in television and became his breakthrough theatrical release. Unemployment is rampant in London's working-class East End, where a middle-aged couple and their two sons languish in a claustrophobic public housing flat. As the brothers (Phil Daniels and Tim Roth) grow increasingly disaffected, Leigh punctuates the grinding boredom of their daily existence with tense encounters, including with a priggish aunt (Marion Bailey) who has managed to become middle-class and a blithering skinhead on the verge of psychosis (a scene-stealing Gary Oldman, in his first major role). Informed by Leigh s now trademark improvisational process and propelled by the lurching rhythms of its Beckett-like dialogue, Meantime is an unrelenting, often blisteringly funny look at life on the dole.
Naked
A charming, eloquent, and vicious drifter on the lam in London rejects those who would care for him and hurls himself into a nocturnal odyssey through the city, colliding with a succession of desperate and dispossessed people and scorching everyone in his path.
Ratcatcher
In her breathtaking and assured debut feature, Lynne Ramsay creates a haunting evocation of a troubled Glasgow childhood. Set during Scotlands national garbage strike of the mid-1970s, Ratcatcher explores the experiences of a poor adolescent boy as he struggles to reconcile his dreams and his guilt with the abjection that surrounds him. Utilizing beautiful, elusive imagery, candid performances, and unexpected humor, Ratcatcher deftly examines the landscape of urban decay and a rich interior landscape of hope and perseverance, resulting in a work at once raw and deeply poetic.
Room at the Top
Laurence Harvey is the 'angry young man' who marries the daughter of a factory boss so he can reach the top of his profession, only to find love in an unhappily married older woman.
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Depicts the romantic lives of two Londoners, a middle-aged doctor and a prickly thirty something divorcee who are sleeping with the same handsome young artist. A revelation in its day, this may be the 1970s most intelligent, multitextured film about the complexities of romantic relationships; it is keenly acted and sensitively directed, from a penetrating screenplay.
A Taste of Honey
Based on one of the most controversial plays of its time, a disaffected teenager finding her way amid the economic desperation of industrial Manchester, and despite an absent, self-absorbed mother. With its unapologetic identification with social outcasts and its sensitive, modern approach to matters of sexuality and race, a classic that is still a startling benchmark work of realism.
This Sporting Life
Northern England, the early 1960's. Frank Machin is a coal miner who is mean, tough and ambitious enough to rise up and become an immediate professional rugby star. The rugby league team is run by local employer Weaver. Machin lodges with Mrs. Hammond, whose husband was killed in an accident at Weaver's, but his impulsive and angry nature stop him from being able to reach her as he would like. He becomes increasingly frustrated with his situation. His situation is not helped by the more straightforward enticements of Mrs. Weaver.
Victim
Melville Farr, a closeted, married barrister who bravely takes on a blackmailer targeting a group of vulnerable gay London men from various walks of life.
Dramatization of the problems of the criminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults. Bogarde plays a successful barrister who places his career on the line by 'coming out' in order to expose a blackmail racket. It was the first British film to concentrate on male homosexuality and was made with the specific intention of supporting the new recommendations of the 1957 Wolfenden Committee for the partial decriminalization of male homosexual acts
Fish Tank
British director Andrea Arnold won the Cannes Jury Prize for this searing and invigorating film about a fifteen-year-old girl, Mia, who lives with her mother and sister in the depressed housing projects of Essex. Mia's adolescent conflicts and emerging sexuality reach boiling points when her mother's new boyfriend enters the picture.
Hunger
In Northern Ireland's Maze prison in 1981, 27-year-old Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike to protest the British government's refusal to recognize him and his fellow IRA inmates as political prisoners. A transcedent depiction of what a human being is willing to endure in order to be heard.
I, Daniel Blake
A carpenter recovering from a heart attack befriends a single mother and her two kids as together they battle the national health care system.
This Is England
School is out for the summer and twelve-year-old Shaun is about to find a dangerous new group of friends. Having lost his father in the Falklands War, life has been lonely in this grim coastal town in northern England. But when Shaun meets the local skinheads, their companionship, and even their violence, appeal to Shaun's hurt and rage. Combo is an older volatile skinhead whom Shaun finds to be like a big brother and under his leadership, the gang and young Shawn will arrive at an irreversible act of violence.
Weekend
This sensual, remarkably observed, beautifully acted wonder is the breakout feature from British writer-director-editor Andrew Haigh. Rarely has a film been as honest about sexuality—in both depiction and discussion—as this tale of a one-night stand that develops into a weekend-long idyll for two very different young men (exciting screen newcomers Tom Cullen and Chris New) in the English Midlands. It’s an emotionally naked film that’s at once an invaluable snapshot of the complexities of contemporary gay living and a universally resonant portrait of a love affair.
Wuthering Heights
An epic love story that spans childhood into adulthood, the film follows Heathcliff, an outsider taken in and given a home by a benevolent Yorkshire farmer, Earnshaw. Heathcliff develops a passionate relationship with the farmer's teenage daughter, Catherine, inspiring the envy and mistrust of his rough-hewn son, Hindley. Years later, when Earnshaw dies, the young adults must finally confront the intense feelings and destructive rivalries that have developed between them.
