Page 1064 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

Film

Race to the cinema for the return of British auteurs

Barry Keoghan filming for Andrea Arnold’s forthcoming film Bird. Photograph: Fraser
Gray/Shutterstock

Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay and Steve McQueen occupy the top rank of British
auteurs: film-makers from whom a new feature qualifies as an event, in part because
they don’t come along all that often. It’s been seven years since Scottish iconoclast
Ramsay teamed up with Joaquin Phoenix for the immaculately hardboiled neo-noir You
Were Never Really Here, and they’ve reunited for Polaris, the director’s first original
screenplay since her 1999 debut, Ratcatcher. It’s set in 19th-century Alaska, and the
synopsis merely states that “an ice photographer meets the devil”.

That’s more information than we have about Bird, Arnold’s first fiction film since
2016’s dazzling American Honey (she has since made the documentary Cow), but the
casting of Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski in the leads is already a draw.

McQueen – still the only person to boast a Turner prize and an Oscar – has also been
busy with nonfiction, Occupied City (9 February) as well as the TV anthology Small
Axe, but he’s returning to narrative cinema with the grand-scale, Apple-backed second
world war drama Blitz. Its ensemble cast includes Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson and
Stephen Graham. Guy Lodge

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