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Benediction Review — Benediction (2022) Film Review, a movie directed and written by Terence Davies, and starring Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeremy Irvine, Calam Lynch, Kate Philips, Gemma Jones, Julian Sands, Tom Blyth, Matthew Tennyson, Richard Goulding, Anton Lesser, and Ben Daniels. World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon is the focus of [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Benediction (2022): A Dappled but Daring Glimpse Inside a Hero’s Closet...

Chicago – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com audio film review on “Benediction,” the biography film of Siegfried Sassoon, a prominent early 20th Century poet who lived his life as a closeted gay man … a somber kick-off to Pride Month. In select theaters, see local listings for theaters and show times.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

This is an unconventional bio as Sassoon became one of Britain’s leading poets in part due to his protest and honor poems after serving as a decorated soldier in World War One. He also was a closeted gay man, evolving through a number of influential relationships including Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson) and Calam Lynch (Stephen Tennant). Later, he married Hester (Kate Phillips) and converted to the Catholic faith in his older age, while at the same time negotiating his relationship with son George (Richard Goulding).

”Benediction” is in select theaters beginning June 3rd. Featuring Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Kate Phillips,...

Most biopics are thuddingly prosaic: There’s a lot of “this happened, then that happened,” performed by a famous person covering themselves in latex in an attempt to resemble another famous person.

In the hands of British auteur Terence Davies, however, biopics can be poetry, although his choice of subject matter probably helps in that department. On the heels of his gorgeous and contemplative “A Quiet Passion,” about the life of Emily Dickinson, he returns with another passionately quiet portrait, this time exploring Siegfried Sassoon in “Benediction.”

It’s an impressionistic collage, and Davies skillfully jumps from the 1910s to the 1960s and back again. “Benediction” fleetingly encapsulates the horrors of WWI — Sassoon went from being a decorated soldier to an outspoken critic against those who would prolong the conflict — the shadow-world of British gay men in the decades before homosexuality was decriminalized in the UK, and the bitterness of...

(center, left-right) Kate Phillips as Hester Gatty and Jack Lowden as famed war poet Siegfried Sassoon in a scene from Terence Davies’ biopic Benediction. Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

A haunting biopic about a haunted man, Benediction is a masterful, visually dynamic film about a complex man famous for his writing about the horror of war. Decorated for bravery and beloved by the soldiers serving with him, Siegfried Sassoon was a WWI British officer who returned from that brutal conflict to vocally oppose the war, and became one of Britain’s acclaimed war poets.

Benediction is a brilliant feast of a film, written and directed by British auteur Terence Davies. Sassoon was among the renowned war poets who came out of WWI, a devastating conflict whose brutality virtually wiped out a generation, toppled monarchies, and prompted the Geneva Convention’s rules on warfare. Sassoon’s pointed yet lyrical war poetry struck...

In multiple interviews over the years, British filmmaker Terence Davies has baldly stated that being gay has ruined his life: “I hate it, I’ll go to my grave hating it … it has killed part of my soul,” he said in 2011, adding that his sexuality is the reason he remains single and celibate. Davies’ professed loneliness and sensitivity has bled through many of his films, wistfully entrenched as they often are in an unattainable past, most recently in a series of female-centered character studies: his swooningly melodramatic, cut-glass adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea,” his amber-cast farm drama “Sunset Song” and his mannered, internalized Emily Dickinson portrait “A Quiet Passion.” Yet Davies has never directly addressed homosexuality in his oeuvre, for all its queer undercurrents; that it’s so openly and sensually a part of his intricate, intensely felt new film “Benediction” is the first of its many surprises.

From a pair of dreamy memoirs about his formative years, an archival documentary that excavated the city in which those years were spent (“Of Time and the City”), and swooning adaptations of the novels and plays that allowed him to make sense of his own wounded soul (“The Deep Blue Sea”), Liverpudlian auteur Terence Davies has established himself as one of the most achingly personal of master filmmakers; this despite his adamant belief that his personal life is “really boring.”

In a 2017 interview with IndieWire, the ever-confessional ex-Catholic insisted he’s “terrified of the world.” Davies spoke about his bitterness at being gay, conceded he’s “too self-conscious” for sex, and repeated a familiar line that any biography written about him would be a leaflet rather than a book. And yet the Emily Dickinson movie that Davies was there to promote is perhaps the most illuminating evidence that all of his films are ultimately self-portraits.

“A Monster Calls” offers a child’s-eye view of cancer. Patrick Ness’ children’s novel, the winner of the 2012 Carnegie Medal and adapted into a 2016 film that starred Felicity Jones, sits with a 13-year-old boy trying to make sense of the disease laying waste to his mother — a disease that rarely, if ever, makes sense. Visited nightly by a storytelling monster, he slowly comes to appreciate that life isn’t a fairytale; it follows no plot. It’s a story about complexity that’s staged, in Sally Cookson’s Old Vic production, with the utmost simplicity.

That is, in the end, its great strength: it allows a sentimental story to cut through with sincerity. For a long while, however, it merely looks slimline: a stock gallery of school bullies, sleepless nights and scary monsters that speak in deep, echoing booms. Childhood, at first, seems the stuff of cliché: all messy bedrooms and deskbound daydreams.

Exclusive: Open Palm Films launches with Dromgoole-directed drama ‘Making Noise Quietly’; first-look image.

Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director of London’s Globe theatre, has launched film production company Open Palm Films.

The indie outfit has recently wrapped its first production Making Noise Quietly (for which Screen can reveal the first image), a drama which is directed by Dromgoole and is adapted from Robert Holman’s well-received stage play of the same name.

The triptych of war-related stories follows a conscientious objector and a roaming artist during the Second World War; a bereaved mother struggling with the loss of her son who died in the Falklands; and an ageing holocaust survivor who seeks to bring peace to a disturbed young boy in Germany.

The film stars Deborah Findlay (The Lady In The Van), Barbara Marten (Oranges and Sunshine), Trystan Gravelle (National Treasure), Geoffrey Streafeild (Rush), Luke Thompson (Dunkirk) and Matthew Tennyson who reprises his role from the stage...

Bernard Cribbins! Matt Lucas! Maxine Peake! The BBC has announced an impressive cast for Russell T Davies’ Midsummer Night’s Dream…

Russell T Davies is returning to the BBC’s Doctor Who base in Cardiff. But he’ll be dabbling in Shakespeare, not spaceships. The cast for his new version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been announced.

For Who fans, the most exciting news is a reunion between Russell T Davies and Bernard Cribbins, who will play Tom Snout, an amateur performer who memorably portrays a wall in a play within the play. Let's hope Cribbins isn't bricking it, eh?

Elsewhere in the cast, you’ve got Maxine Peake as Titania, Matt Lucas as Bottom, and John Hannah as Theseus. Eleanor Matsuura of Spooks will play Hippolyta and Hiran Abeysekera (seen in Lion In The Tent) will portray Puck.

Cucumber alum Fisayo Akinade has been cast as Flute,...