It's the Queen's English, Innit?

The first and most unnerving thing about this film are the scenes that feature 6, 7 or eight year-old princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. It is completely impossible to see them without feeling jarred and second-guessed by our own memories of the dessicated, pinched, cornered vision of Englishness that the Windsors have come to represent.

It's a wonderful piece of drama in spite of the protagonists. Deceitful, fraudulent Australian 'therapist' hoodwinks desperate, pompous Royal into bizarre theatre-based treatment regime for his stutter. You'd think it would be hard to make anything dramatic or engaging cinematically with this. By the simple expedient of using a chilly, foggy, dusty lighting and design aesthetic (thereby side-stepping the emetic heritage visual cues that get these films flogged to death abroad) and getting brilliant actors in close-up like Rush and Bonham-Carter to, well, act, and not do anything to distract from this, it works rather beautifully. Guy Pearce is pallid, acidic, petulant, honest and thereby blends into the film excellently.

Wasp Lights

This 25 minute short film only came up on my radar when it found its way on to the bonus features of a DVD of Andrea Arnold's gob-smacking "Fish Tank".

It's a torrent of a film, plunging us down stairwells, plonking us on the pavement outside council-estate pubs, unceremoniously dumping us on the scrubby grass between residential tower blocks as vindictive rows play their joyless way out over our heads.

Within about 45 seconds of the film starting I knew I cared about this woman and her children, and about what would have happened to them by the end of the day, and about whether the simple business of finding some food and going on a date would be too much for her.

It just goes to show that the Oscar committee might not be completely dominated by star-struck cheese-merchants that "Wasp" won an award for best live-action short film.

Heart-rending and brutal in the same frame.