Actualités

No; Beyond the Hills; Warm Bodies; Beautiful Creatures; Hitchcock; To the Wonder

A gripping combination of political history and personal intrigue, Pablo Larraín's No (2012, Network, 15) dramatically recounts the campaign to remove General Pinochet from power during the 1988 Chilean referendum. Based on a stage play by Antonio Skármeta, the action centres on René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), an advertising executive enlisted to sell the "No" campaign to a nation with the slogan "Happiness is coming", to the displeasure of the hard-line politicos who believe he's belittling their cause.

The completion of a thematic trilogy (following Tony Manero and Post Mortem), No benefits from Larraín's bold use of boxy, grainy U-matic video stock, which enables him to blend latterday recreations with authentic archival TV footage. The result is a seamless mix of fact and fiction, brought together through a unifying aesthetic in which the medium perfectly fits the message.

At times...

From Meryl Streep's Iron Lady to Spitting Image and the Spice Girls, Observer writers and critics pick the films, books, art, music and TV that show Thatcher's lasting influence

Art, chosen by Laura Cumming

Treatment Room (1983)

In Richard Hamilton's installation, Thatcher administered her own harsh medicine from a video above the operating table with the viewer as helpless patient: a case of kill or cure.

Taking Stock (1984)

Hans Haacke portrayed Thatcher enthroned, nose in the air like a gun-dog, surrounded by images of Queen Victoria, the Saatchi brothers and, ominously, Pandora. Caused national furore.

In the Sleep of Reason (1982)

Mark Wallinger edited Thatcher's 1982 Falklands speech from blink to blink, fading to black in between, emphasising her solipsistic tendency to close her eyes when speaking as if nobody else existed.

The Battle of Orgreave (2001)

Jeremy Deller's restaged the worst conflict of the miners' strike from multiple viewpoints, uniting...

The recent biopic, The Iron Lady, doesn't tell the whole story of Margaret Thatcher's impact on British cinema: for that you have to go back to the difficult, confrontational days of the 1980s. But it's safe to say, nothing was the same again

Only recently, filmgoers had been invited to believe in Margaret Thatcher as post-feminist victim-heroine, an image which bemused those who remembered the Pm in her pomp. In Phyllida Lloyd's 2011 film The Iron Lady, she had become a lonely and confused old dear, whose flashes of grandeur and hauteur at political soirées were the more poignant for being so fleeting. The leader once reviled by the liberal classes now had the ultimate distinction of being impersonated — with eerie accuracy — by Meryl Streep. Andrea Riseborough's "underdog" portrayal of young Margaret's battle for a parliamentary seat was similarly sympathetic in the 2008 TV movie The Long Walk to Finchley.