James Harvey

6 days ago | filmstories.co.uk | James Harvey

In UK cinemas today, director Lorcan Finnegan’s surfer-less surf movie The Surfer is the perfect metaphor for 2025 – and not in a nice way. In the summer of 2022, UK temperatures reached an unfortunate high of 40.3°C. That July, I remember wandering the streets of south London in a daze, every patch of grass a golden-brown graveyard, watching a man vomit water into a bin as a wildfire ripped through the capital a dozen miles to the north.

1 week ago | filmstories.co.uk | James Harvey

Noah Stratton-Twine talks his improvised creature feature and the desire to make a different kind of British indie… Read more about Two Big Feet below. An expanded form of this interview will appear in Film Stories issue 56, available in June 2025. “I grew up in West Sussex, around 30 minutes away from the Five Hundred Acre Wood – this very folkloric forest,” director Noah Stratton-Twine tells me.

2 weeks ago | filmstories.co.uk | James Harvey

Internet sleuths and Sky News have teamed up to uncover the iconic anti-piracy ads’ accidentally dubious history. If you ever bought (or, we suppose, stole) a DVD in 2004, you’ll be very familiar with a certain anti-piracy advert. Opening with the much-parodied assertion that “you wouldn’t steal a car” set to some very aggressive backing music, it now transpires that the campaign’s creators may have accidentally resorted to, er, piracy, with regard to its infamous font.

2 weeks ago | filmstories.co.uk | James Harvey

Rose Ayling-Ellis has been announced as the first deaf host of the glitzy Into Film Awards. More below…Rose Ayling-Ellis has been announced as the host of the 2025 Into Film Awards, due to take place in London’s Leicester Square this June. Ayling-Ellis recently won an RTS award for her work as the first deaf presenter of live sport at the 2024 Paralympics. She also appeared in the most recent episode of Doctor Who as a cook on a future mining colony – check out our review here.

2 weeks ago | filmstories.co.uk | James Harvey

Get ready for a big night in – Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is heading to home video. More below…The Bridget Jones franchise, for whatever reason, has always felt very at home on home video. Something about its 2000s-ness just doesn’t feel right at home without the high-pitched whine of a disc in a slightly knackered DVD player. We’re happy to say, then, that Jones is making a triumphant return to the small screen on 2nd June, when the UK-region Blu-ray and DVD packages go on sale.