Next Monday we have the DVD release of director Steve McQueen’s fantastic, multi-layered crime thriller Widows, featuring an all-star cast including Viola Davis, Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Cynthia Erivo, Jacki Weaver and Robert Duvall. Based on the Lynda La Plante book and TV series from the 1980s, it centres around a group of women who, after their husbands are killed during a botched robbery, team up to pull off a job they were planning.
I was a huge fan of the film when it was released in cinemas last year – how it wasn’t up for all the Oscars is beyond me – not just for how it works as a straight up crime thriller but the way it uses that framework to explore everything from racism and sexism to political corruption and the wealth divide in modern society. It really is a terrific piece of work from one of the best directors working today, one that will surely benefit repeat viewings.
To celebrate the film’s home release, we have a DVD copy of it to give away, thanks Twentieth Century Fox.
To enter the competition simply answer the following question: which Steve McQueen-directed film won the Oscar for Best Picture?
a) Hunger b) Shame c) 12 Years a Slave
Please email your answer to rosstmiller@thoughtsonfilm.co.uk with the subject heading “Widows competition.” Please also include your delivery address details so we can easily send the prize out if you win.
Now for the technical part:
UK residents only
Entrants must be 18 or over
Winners will be chosen at random
The prize is one DVD copy of Widows
Prize is non-transferable
Competition ends on Sunday March 24th at 11:59pm GMT
Prize will be sent from PR/studio
Widows is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray from March 18th. You can already rent/buy the film digitally.
Best of luck on the competition! Just for fun, which is your favourite of Steve McQueen’s films so far? Leave your thoughts on his directorial work below.
I'm a freelance film reviewer and blogger with over 10 years of experience writing for various different reputable online and print publications. In addition to my running, editing and writing for Thoughts On Film, I am also the film critic for The National, the newspaper that supports an independent Scotland, covering the weekly film releases, film festivals and film-related features.
I have a passion for all types of cinema, and have a particular love for foreign language film, especially South Korean and Japanese cinema. Favourite films include The Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
***This competition is now closed. Thanks to all who entered! The two winners will be contacted soon!
This coming Monday sees the DVD and Blu-ray release of King of Thieves, the latest film from acclaimed director James Marsh (Man on Wire, The Theory of Everything), which features a cavalcade of legendary British actors including Michael Caine, Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon and Paul Whitehouse who team up to pull off a brazen heist. You may know the job from our own headlines as “The Hatton Garden Heist,” described as the biggest and most daring heist in British history.
It’s a good slice of old-fashioned heist movie fun which morphs in its latter half into something with surprising touches of the dangerous and sinister as suspicions and loyalties start to inevitably turn.
To celebrate the film’s release, we have two copies of it on DVD to give away, thanks to the lovely folk at Studio Canal.
To enter the competition simply answer the following question: in which classic British film does Michael Caine famously say the line, “you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”?
a) Alfie b) The Italian Job c) The Ipcress File
Please email your answer to rosstmiller@thoughtsonfilm.co.uk with the subject heading “King of Thieves competition.” Please also include your delivery address details so we can easily send the prize out if you win.
Now for the technical part:
UK residents only
Entrants must be 18 or over
Winners will be chosen at random
The prize for each entrant is one DVD copy of King of Thieves
Prize is non-transferable
Competition ends on Sunday January 27th at 11:59pm GMT
Prize will be sent from PR/studio
King of Thieves is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray from January 21st. You can already rent/buy the film digitally.
A spate of films have appeared on our screens as of late that feel like they only really could have been made now, as a sort of culmination of what has come before, a breaking point, explored in ways that hold a mirror up to how the situation is presently, whether set modern day (Assassination Nation, The Hate U Give) or in the past (BlacKkKlansman).
The latest is Monsters and Men, a thoughtful, ambitious and keenly-judged feature debut from writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green that deals with the ricocheting effect of a black man being gunned down by police officers who purportedly perceived he was a threat to them, despite a videotaping witness suggesting he didn’t have a gun in his hand as the cops attested.
It’s a film of three distinct parts threaded together by how one event ripples through individual lives, evoking the Oscar-winning Moonlight in form at least with its three-tier structure as each of the character-driven pieces present us with their own angle on the specific situation that drives the plot and the societal themes at large. As it starts out it makes you believe you’re only going to see things from one perspective before revealing a really well-played contrasting and complimenting set-up that’s both narratively and thematically satisfying.
There’s the key witness filming the event, Manny (Anthony Ramos) who has just started a new job to provide for his wife and young daughter who has to weigh up the negative effect uploading the video to the web will have on his family’s life against his need to let the world see what actually happened. There’s the strong-willed black police officer, Dennis (John David Washington, who also starred in the aforementioned BlacKkKlansman), within the system who wasn’t directly involved with the shooting but who is colleagues with the officers responsible and with a family of his own to think about every time he heads out to patrol the city streets. And finally a young baseball star-in-the-making, Zyrick (Kevin Harrison Jr.), who is inspired to take protesting action after watching the footage.
In the middle police-focused segment, it refreshingly touches on the idea of the danger cops put themselves in every day as much as it lends vital weight to the argument that there is really no excuse for a group of officers to gun down an unarmed black man. “One cop’s mistake and now we’re all to blame,” explains Dennis when a dinner date turns sour once conversation turns to the shooting. “I thought you were different, that maybe you were part of the solution” retorts the family friends who brought the topic up. Both lines ring in your ears.
John David Washington as Officer Dennis Williams in “Monsters and Men”
It’s the film’s strongest and most thought-provoking segment, evoking the likes of Rampart (directed by one of this film’s executive producers, Oren Moverman) and even TV’s The Shield, if not in visceral immediacy then certainly in the ways it explores interdepartmental attitudes, procedures and loyalty in the face of intense, albeit sadly all-too-common occurrences on the street.
As a whole it’s a bit more of a studied, comparatively subdued experience than the far more rambunctious, fired-up The Hate U Give. Nevertheless, in its own quietly powerful way, it explores the micro and macro effects of violence and killing at the hands of police officer that are an unfortunate regular occurrence in America, asking difficult and necessary questions that really stay with you.
Is this an inevitability of modern day life in America? Is there a solution? Why should it be allowed to continue? Where does police protecting themselves end and police brutality begin? The words “Black Lives Matter” never actually cross the lips of anyone in the film but it nevertheless pulses through every scene. In the wake of Charlottesville in particular, it’s a film that takes on more weight, making you think as it compels with its story filled with excellent performances, involving soundscape (the amplified sounds of the New York City streets is brilliantly achieved) and memorable score by Kris Bowers that’s at once sorrowful and hopeful, encapsulating the film’s ethos that these terrible things happen but there’s light at the end of the tunnel that things might some day change.
Monsters and Men is in UK cinemas from Friday January 18th.
