Cor blimey guv'nor, it’s almost time for this year’s British Film Festival. Taking over Palace Cinemas across a newly unlocked Sydney from November 3 until December 1, as ever it’s a real who’s who of acting royalty, including not one but two queens in the form of Her Royal Highness' Olivia Colman and Helen Mirren.
They are flanked by Love, Actually’s Colin Firth, Ab Fab’s outrageously cool Joanna Lumley, former Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi, the lovely Jim Broadbent who memorably brought to life Bridget Jones’ dad, and Timothy Spall, the wicked Wormtail from the Harry Potter movies.
The first drop of films includes opening night treat The Duke, which pairs Broadbent with Mirren in the eye-opening true story of a taxi driver turned art thief who infamously stole Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. If you are a devoted fan of The Crown, you’ll be able to see Coleman reunited with her on-screen son Josh O’Connor who played Prince Charles, with Firth to boot in Mothering Sunday, a romantic period drama set during the First World War. If rom coms are you thing, Aussie star Danielle Macdonald plays an American following her heart in an opera-loving Scottish village in Falling for Figaro, with Lumley as her opera coach.
Spall pulls heartstrings in The Last Bus, about a widowed man who uses said mode of public transport to shuttle from one end of the UK to the other, and you can weep to Benediction, a lush biopic about closeted war hero-turned-pacifist and poet Siegfried Sassoon. Dunkirk's Jack Lowdon plays him as a young man, with Capaldi stepping in to depict his later years. And if literary history is your bag, there’s also To Olivia, about the rocky marriage between beloved children’s author Roald Dahl and Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal.
The full program drops on October 14. Stay tuned for more.