Better Things (film)

Better Things is a 2008 film written and directed by Duane Hopkins. Set in presentday rural England, the film presents a multinarrative tale following the young and old on their journeys of withdrawal and commitment to each other.

Better Things premiered in the official selection of International Critics Week at the Cannes Film Festival, May 2008.The critical response to Better Things was positive, with the film reviewed as Film of the Month in Sight and Sound magazine, film of the week in Le Monde, chosen as one of Film Comment Selects best films of 2009, and shortlisted for The Guardians First Film Award 2009. It was, however, also attacked in some quarters for its supposed bleakness and unrelenting tone. Many favourable critics responded to what they found to be the films visual beauty, and an innovative cinematic reworking of the British Social Realist form. Variety compared the film in different ways to works by American photographer Nan Goldin particularly her The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and the British directors Lynne Ramsay and Alan Clarke. The film journalist Richard T Kelly referred to Bruno Dumont and Robert Bresson in his appreciation of the films approach. Other critics drew visual and thematic connections to Romanticism, noting imagery reminiscent of Gainsborough or Constable to grandiloquent, tempestuous shots evoking Caspar David Friedrich, and the bold style of other late Romantics. Vilhelm Hammershi is similarly referenced, as well as the films most vivid and direct quotation that of Henry Wallis Chatterton. Much was made of the films perceived stylistic innovations that moved away from the traditional British Social Realist modes of Loach or Leigh whilst still rendering avowedly realist characters and subject matter. With Better Things Hopkins was positioned as part of a British New Wave of directors, alongside Steve McQueen and others, demonstrating that there was a new generation of British cinema coming to the boil. This thread was later taken up in New Cinemas Journal of Contemporary Film, with a detailed analysis of contemporary British realist cinema that used Better Things as a point of entry in discussing how the likes of Hopkins,

Source: Wikipedia