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Martin Scorsese’s deep love of film shines through in his exploration of the marvelous movies by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. As directors with a true artist’s eye, Powell and Pressburger crafted some of Britain’s most imaginative and meaningful pictures. Through their company, The Archers, they strove to elevate cinema as an expressive art.

In Made in England, Scorsese brings their extraordinary body of work to new viewers. With infectious passion, he shares insights into their techniques and themes—and how deeply their films enriched his own career. At the documentary’s heart, of course, are illuminating clips and discussions that bring Powell and Pressburger’s brilliance alive. From The Red Shoes to Black Narcissus, their images leave a lasting imprint.

What makes this documentary so wonderful is Scorsese’s obvious joy in celebration. He treats cinema not as formula but as expressions of life. With Made in England,...

David Lean would’ve celebrated his 112th birthday on March 25, 2020. The Oscar-winning director became famous for a series of visual striking, technically ambitious epics, but how many of those titles remain classics? In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at all 16 of his films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1908, Lean cut his teeth as a film editor, cutting a number of prominent movies including “49th Parallel” (1941) and “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing” (1942) for his contemporary, Michael Powell. He transitioned into directing, working alongside acclaimed playwright Noel Coward with “In Which We Serve” (1942). The WWII Naval epic was a joint venture for the two, with Coward (who also wrote and starred) handling the acting scenes and Lean tackling the action sequences.

He earned his first Oscar nominations for writing and directing “Brief Encounter” (1945), a big screen version of Coward’s play about two strangers (Trevor Howard...

Ronald Neame remains somewhat of an underrated, incredibly multi-faceted figure from the annals of classic British cinema. Beginning as a writer/producer/cinematographer for David Lean, Neame began his directorial debut in the late 1940s and stretched into the mid-1980s.

Twice competing at Cannes (his 1969 Muriel Sparks adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie won Maggie Smith her first Oscar), his work ranged from film noir (the Locarno entry The Golden Salamander) and twice went to Venice, with 1958’s The Horse’s Mouth and 1960’s underappreciated post-wwii drama Tunes of Glory, one of three Neame titles to join the Criterion Collection (including The Horse’s Mouth and Hopscotch), and won John Mills Best Actor in Venice while scribe James Kennaway nabbed an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (from his own novel).…...

David Lean would’ve celebrated his 111th birthday on March 25, 2019. The Oscar-winning director became famous for a series of visual striking, technically ambitious epics, but how many of those titles remain classics? In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at all 16 of his films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1908, Lean cut his teeth as a film editor, cutting a number of prominent movies including “49th Parallel” (1941) and “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing” (1942) for his contemporary, Michael Powell. He transitioned into directing, working alongside acclaimed playwright Noel Coward with “In Which We Serve” (1942). The WWII Naval epic was a joint venture for the two, with Coward (who also wrote and starred) handling the acting scenes and Lean tackling the action sequences.

SEEOscar Best Director Gallery: Every Winner In Academy Award History

He earned his first Oscar nominations for writing and directing “Brief Encounter” (1945), a big...

The wonder movie of 1946 sees the Archers infusing the ‘Film Blanc’ fantasy with amazing images and powerful emotions. Imagination and resourcefulness accomplishes miracles on a Stairway to Heaven, with visual effects never bettered in the pre-cgi era. Michael Powell’s command of the screen overpowers a soon-obsoleted theme about U.S.- British relations.

A Matter of Life and Death

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 939

1946 / Color / 1:37 flat Academy / 104 min. / Stairway to Heaven / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date July 26, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: David Niven, Kim Hunter, Marius Goring, Roger Livesey, Robert Coote, Kathleen Byron, Richard Attenborough, Bonar Colleano, Joan Maude.

Cinematography: Jack Cardiff

Film Editor: Reginald Mills

Production Design: Alfred Junge

Original Music: Allan Gray

Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger came into their own making wartime movies, most of which steered far clear of the accepted definition of propaganda. After their Anglo-Dutch...

Lone Scherfig’s “Their Finest” isn’t a biopic, but that doesn’t mean the World War II-set romantic drama isn’t true.

Adapted by Gabby Chiappe from Lissa Evans’ novel, “Their Finest Hour and a Half,” Scherfig’s latest period piece traces a fictionalized heroine as she changes the face of England’s propaganda-film machine in the waning days of World War II. Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) isn’t a big dreamer — in war-torn London, no one is — but when she’s drafted into writing feel-good scripts for the Ministry of Information, she unexpectedly finds her calling.

“There were female scriptwriters at the time, but they weren’t credited,” Scherfig said. “They did write a lot, and the character is very loosely based on one of those.”

Scherfig, known for her early Dogme features and her breakout “An Education,” saw herself in both Catrin and in the character’s new and weird professional world.

How could England have won the war without him? Horatio Smith sneaks about in Nazi Germany, liberating concentration camp inmates right under the noses of the Gestapo. Leslie Howard directed and stars in this wartime escapist spy thriller, as a witty professor too passive to be suspected as the mystery spy.

‘Pimpernel’ Smith

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1941 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 121 min. / Street Date November 15, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring Leslie Howard, Francis L. Sullivan, Mary Morris, Allan Jeayes, Peter Gawthorne, Hugh McDermott, David Tomlinson, Raymond Huntley, Sebastian Cabot, Irene Handl, Ronald Howard, Michael Rennie.

Cinematography Mutz Greenbaum

Camera Operators Guy Green, Jack Hildyard

Film Editor Douglas Myers

Original Music John Greenwood

Written by Anatole de Grunwald, Roland Pertwee, A.G. Macdonell, Wolfgang Wilhelm based on a character by Baroness Emmuska Orczy

Produced by Leslie Howard, Harold Huth

Directed by Leslie Howard

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

I like movies...

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger officially become ‘The Archers’ for this sterling morale-propaganda picture lauding the help of the valiant Dutch resistance. It’s a joyful show of spirit, terrific casting (with a couple of surprises) and first-class English filmmaking.

One of Our Aircraft is Missing

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1942 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy /103 82 min. / Street Date November 15, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman, Hugh Williams, Bernard Miles, Hugh Burden, Emrys Jones, Pamela Brown, Joyce Redman, Googie Withers, Hay Petrie, Arnold Marlé, Robert Helpmann, Peter Ustinov, Roland Culver, Robert Beatty, Michael Powell.

Cinematography Ronald Neame

Film Editor David Lean

Camera Crew Robert Krasker, Guy Green

Written by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Produced by The Archers

Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

There are still a few more key Powell-Pressburger ‘Archer’ films waiting for a quality disc release, Contraband and Gone to Earth for just two.

Cinematography festival to present retrospective on the innovative British film-making duo, attended by Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker.

Camerimage (Nov 15-22) is to host a special retrospective around the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

The film festival that celebrates cinematography, held in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, will be attended by Powell’s wife and three-time Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker as well as film scholars and Powell-Pressburger experts Erich Sargeant and Ian Christie.

Films of the due set to be screened at Camerimage include:

The Edge Of The World; 1937; cin. Monty Berman, Skeets Kelly, Ernest Palmer

One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing; 1942; cin. Ronald Neame

The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp; 1943; cin. Georges Périnal

A Canterbury Tale; 1944; cin. Erwin Hillier

‘I Know Where I’m Going!’; 1945; cin. Erwin Hillier

A Matter Of Life And Death; 1946; cin. Jack Cardiff

Black Narcissus; 1947; cin. Jack Cardiff

The Red Shoes; 1948; cin. Jack Cardiff

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Vivacious Irish actor best known for her role opposite Albert Finney in Tom Jones

The red-haired, vivacious and provocative Irish actor Joyce Redman, who has died aged 93, will for ever be remembered for her lubricious meal-time munching and swallowing opposite Albert Finney in Tony Richardson's 1963 film of Tom Jones. Eyes locked, lips smacked and jaws rotated as the two of them tucked into a succulent feast while eyeing up the afters. Sinking one's teeth into a role is one thing. This was quite another, and deliciously naughty, the mother of all modern mastication scenes.

Redman and Finney were renewing a friendship forged five years earlier when both appeared with Charles Laughton in Jane Arden's The Party at the New (now the Noël Coward) theatre. Redman was not blamed by the critic Kenneth Tynan for making nothing of her role as Laughton's wife. "Nothing," he said, "after all, will come of nothing.

Actress Joyce Redman, Oscar nominated for both Tom Jones and Othello, died in Kent, England, earlier today. The Newcastle-born Redman, who was either 93 or 96, had been suffering from pneumonia. Film lovers will remember her as Tom Jones‘ Mrs. Waters, stealing the movie while “sexting” — as in, sex while eating — Albert Finney. Mostly a stage and television performer, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art-trained Redman appeared in only a handful of movies. Yet, her brief film career was notable because of her two Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nominations. In fact, Redman brought "Oscar luck" to her movies and fellow players: Best Picture Oscar winner Tom Jones (1963) earned five nominations in the acting categories (Joyce Redman, Albert Finney, Diane Cilento, Dame Edith Evans, Hugh Griffith), while the filmed version of Britain’s National Theatre presentation of Othello (1965) earned four (Joyce Redman as Emilia, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Frank Finlay). Regarding the nominations for the Othello actors,...

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) "so unambiguously [satirizes] the military mind-set that Prime Minister Winston Churchill tried to have it banned," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Newly restored by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation and playing two weeks [starting Friday] at Film Forum in its full length, Colonel Blimp is as stylized in its florid palette, lavish mise-en-scène, and obtrusive musical cues as Powell and Pressburger's subsequent The Red Shoes. Beginning and ending in London under the blitz, the movie spans 40 years, tracking the career of General Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) from dashing young hero of the Boer War to the sort of walrus-mustached establishment fogy that political cartoonist David Low named 'Colonel Blimp.' … The filmmakers originally wanted Laurence Olivier, but it seems unlikely that so acerbic an actor could have delivered so warm a performance."

"Seeing Colonel Blimp strictly in the...

Veteran British actress Googie Withers has died at the age of 94.

The star, born Georgette Lizette Withers, passed away at her home in Sydney, Australia on Friday. No further information was available as WENN went to press.

Withers was working as a dancer in London's West End when she was asked to be an extra in the 1935 movie The Girl in the Crowd - but she ended up with a main role after director Michael Powell fired a lead actress.

She went on to rack up credits in films such as The Gang's All Here and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, and also appeared on Broadway.

But she will be best remembered for playing Blanche in Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, opposite Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.

Withers was the first non-Australian to be made an Officer of the Order of Australia and she was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2002.

She married Australian actor John McCallum, who helped create the cult TV series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.

They had three children and lived together in Sydney until McCallum's death last year.

Actress Googie Withers, best known for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, has died aged 94. Googie (born Georgette Lizette Withers) died in her home in Australia on Friday. She was born in British India in 1917, and she took up acting at 12 years old, when her family returned to England. She worked on a huge number of British films throughout the '30s and '40s, including The Lady Vanishes, Powell and Pressburger's One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing and Ealing Studios' portmanteau spooker Dead Of Night. Withers met her husband,...

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A striking presence on stage and in the great days of British film, she played the prison governor of TV's Within These Walls

Followers of postwar cinema may well recall Googie Withers's striking presence in It Always Rains On Sunday, an unusually intense film for the Ealing Studios of 1947. A bored wife, she gives shelter to an ex-lover, now a murderer on the run, played by John McCallum, soon to be her real-life husband. The lovers were shown as unsympathetically as they might have been in French film noir, and the weather was bad even by British standards.

What Withers, who has died aged 94, brought to that performance was to define her strength in some of her most powerful roles. Too strong a face and too grand a manner prevented her being thought conventionally pretty, but she was imposingly watchable because of an obvious vigour and sexuality. Thus equipped,...

With the passing of British filmmaker Ronald Neame, I decided to revisit the classic Archers' film "One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing" (1941). Here is an historic film, released when the Brits were at their lowest ebb in the war, and due to its public domain status, it is only available in a muddy print, with the sound so muffled you can scarcely make out the dialogue. For those who love and value great film, this is a disgrace, an atrocity, a defiling- something like spraying whipped cream on the Mona Lisa. I've said this before, but it bears repeating: thank God for the Criterion Collection. They have led the way in restoring great public domain titles to their proper condition. Among the films they've rescued from the dustbin of history: Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps" (1935) and "The Lady Vanishes" (1938), the...

Producer, director and cinematographer of many well-loved British film classics, including Oliver Twist, Tunes of Glory and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The producer, director, writer and cinematographer Ronald Neame, who has died aged 99, played an important role in British cinema for more than half a century. The critic Matthew Sweet once called him "a living embodiment of cinema, a sort of one-man world heritage site". Neame was assistant director to Alfred Hitchcock on Blackmail (1929), the first British talkie; he was the cinematographer on In Which We Serve (1942), Noël Coward's moving tribute to the Royal Navy during the second world war; he co-produced and co-wrote David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946); and he directed Alec Guinness in two of his best roles, in The Horse's Mouth (1958) and Tunes of Glory (1960). As if this wasn't enough, Neame also conquered Hollywoo d with one of the first and most successful disaster movies,...

British filmmaker Ronald Neame, whose career dates back to serving as assistant cameraman on the first feature film made with sound in Great Britain, Alfred Hitchcock's "Blackmail," has died, according to reports. He was 99.

No details were available.

His directing credits ranged from "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972) to "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969), for which Maggie Smith won the Oscar for best actress.

As a producer, Neame was involved with three British classics: "Brief Encounter" (1945), "Great Expectations" (1946) and "Oliver Twist" (1948). "Brief Encounter" and "Great Expectations" were the fruition of a production partnership called Cineguild that Neame had formed with David Lean and Anthony Havelock-Allan.

As a screenwriter, Neame earned Oscar nominations for the screenplays of "Brief," adapted from a Noel Coward play, and "Expectations," from Charles Dickens' novel. He shared those distinctions with Lean and Havelock-Allan.

Cineguild broke up in 1947 with a fall-out between Neame and Lean when...