Screen Education No. 95

YEAR 8 AVAILABLE NOW Depth Study 1: The Western and Islamic World » Medieval Europe » The Ottoman Empire » Renaissance Italy » The Vikings Depth Study 2: The Asia-Pacific World » Japan Under the » The Polynesian Shoguns Expansion Across » Angkor/Khmer Empire the Pacific Depth Study 3: Expanding Contacts » Mongol Expansion » The Spanish » The Black Death in Conquest of the Asia, Europe and Africa Americas Depth Study 6D (NSW: Expanding Contacts) » Aboriginal and Indigenous Peoples, Colonisation and Contact History (Covers Australian Aborigines, North American Indians, New Zealand Maori) AVAILABLE NOW 2019 (INCLUDES TITLES FOR DEPTH STUDY 1 AND 3 . Depth Study 1: Making a Better World? » The Industrial Revolution Depth Study 2: Australia and Asia » Making a Nation (Forthcoming in 2019)…

Towards the conclusion of The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018), Lady Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), remarks to her cousin, Abigail Masham, nee Hill (Emma Stone), ‘We were playing very different games.’ This remark is not entirely true. Sarah has fallen out of favour with Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), despite her long-time status as the British monarch’s closest confidant and political adviser. Meanwhile, Abigail has ascended from the scullery, securing a noble marriage to Colonel Samuel Masham (Joe Alwyn) and £2000 a year on her way up. Sarah, who has been close to Anne since they were girls, has lost her place as the queen’s ‘favourite’ to a woman unafraid to ‘act in a way that meets with the edges of [her] morality’. To make that point violently clear,…

1 The Favourite is Lanthimos’ third consecutive film made in English and featuring an international cast after The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). 2 Yorgos Lanthimos, quoted in Ian Freer, ‘Five Reasons to Watch The Favourite’, The Telegraph, 20 December 2018, <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/the-favourite/reasons -to-watch/>, accessed 20 June 2019. 3 Molly Haskell, ‘Review: The Favourite’, Film Comment, November–December 2018, <https://www.filmcomment.com/ article/review-the-favourite/>, accessed 20 June 2019. 4 See, for instance, Andrew Higson, ‘English Heritage, English Literature, English Cinema: Selling Jane Austen to Movie Audiences in the 1990s’, in Eckart Voigts-Virchow (ed.), Janespotting and Beyond: British Heritage Revisions Since the Mid-1990s, Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, 2004, pp. 35–50. 5 As Guardian columnist Ellen E Jones explains, The Favourite takes its place among these films and other recent…

‘Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?’ So asks Michael (Philip Ettinger), an environmental activist battling debilitating depression, in the opening act of First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017). He’s putting the question to a local pastor, Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), who’s there at the behest of Michael’s wife, Mary (Amanda Seyfried). She’s pregnant, and the thought of bringing life into a dying world, in full knowledge of the imminent climate cataclysm, has filled Michael with guilt. His question about God’s forgiveness is a provocation: issued to the film’s protagonist, but also by Schrader to its audience. Schrader has long been a provocateur, having penned the screenplay to Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), that antisocial classic steeped in the urban decay and post-Vietnam loathing of 1970s…

1 Paul Schrader, quoted in Brad Gullickson, ‘Paul Schrader Details the Journey of God’s Lonely Man from Taxi Driver to First Reformed’, Film School Rejects, 20 May 2018, <https://filmschoolrejects.com/paul-schrader-first -reformed/>, accessed 20 June 2019. 2 Paul Schrader, quoted in Paul Risker, ‘Cinema Is Anti-spiritual: Interview with First Reformed Director Paul Schrader’, Pop Matters, 13 July 2018, <https://www. popmatters.com/paul-schrader-interview-2586097121.html>, accessed 20 June 2019. 3 See Nathan Rabin, ‘Paul Schrader’, The A.V. Club, 16 October 2002, <https://www.avclub.com/paul-schrader-1798208245>,accessed 18 June 2019. 4 Paul Schrader, quoted in Harry Haun, ‘From Taxi Driver to First Reformed, an Interview with Paul Schrader’, America: The Jesuit Review, 5 January 2019, <https://www. americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2019/01/05/taxi-driver-first-reformed-interview-paul-schrader>, accessed 20 June 2019. 5 Paul Schrader, quoted in Trevor Johnston, ‘Paul Schrader on First Reformed and the Age of Hopelessness: “Is My Work Here…

The first of the Paddington films,1 directed by Paul King and based on the series of acclaimed children’s books written by Michael Bond, was released in 2014 to critical acclaim. The big-screen adventures of the titular bear from ‘Darkest Peru’ (voiced by Ben Whishaw), who makes his way to busy London and finds a home with a family there, achieved a specific combination of charming, eccentric and engaging that younger (and older) audiences responded to in droves.2 That film’s nostalgic whimsy is something that’s often missing from the more mainstream children’s titles that pepper the box office, but it’s a quality that is only strengthened in Paddington 2 (King, 2017). As such, the more recent film is arguably the better of the two – a rarity when it comes to…