Week Commencing 8th March 

Week Commencing 15th March

"The British kitchen sink drama receives a welcome injection of texture, fragmentation and rhythm in Richard Billingham’s Ray & Liz, a highlight of the 2018 Locarno Film Festival competition. Largely retelling his own troubled childhood spent in Birmingham during the Thatcher era, the celebrated photographer and artist’s debut feature is by turns brutal, tender and bleakly funny."

James Lattimer, Sight & Sound

"It’s the way art imitates, reflects and recomposes other art — specifically, Billingham’s much-discussed photography — that lends complex layers of memoir and mimesis to this singular spin on the British kitchen-sink drama, preserving both the director’s childhood and his creative evolution in gorgeous, grainy amber…

“Ray & Liz” stands as a uniquely moving work of self-identification and self-illustration, bristling with pride, anger and even some regret — for the general ugly state of things, certainly, but perhaps for a family he’s come to see, and shoot, a little differently over the decades."

Guy Lodge, Variety

"A striking, sustained artistic achievement… A beautifully understated, heart melting performance from Joshua Millard Lloyd is a stand out and gives the film a real grip on the emotions."

Allan Hunter, Screen International

"It’s a beautifully crafted and meticulously made snapshot of life on the margins of society."

Rob Aldham, Backseat Mafia

"The first feature from photographer Richard Billingham is a moving yet unsentimental portrait of a life in fragments, as empathetic as it is brutal."

Elena Lazic, Seventh Row

"A remarkable debut…an immersive poetic-realist dive into the artist’s fractured memories of his parents during the time he spent growing up in Birmingham in the ‘70s and ‘80s."

Rory O’Connor, The Film Stage

★★★★

“Billingham uses his talent for still photography as much as his own memories to craft a portrait of poverty without pity, through love laced with dysfunction…It’s a love letter as much as a demand for an apology, a reckoning with a life lived in decay which unfolds with a humble but powerful stillness.”

Ella Kemp, Culture Whisper