A Flash of Genius
Landscapers, by Ed Sinclair and Will Sharpe, directed by Will Sharpe, 2021.
IN THE late Fifties and early Sixties, when the British New Wave expanded from the Royal Court Theatre and the stages of the West End to the screen, English filmmakers produced some of the most literate and emotionally complex movies in the world. Then, in the Eighties, often responding to outrages of the Thatcher era, the Brits came to the fore again, easily—and embarrassingly—outclassing Hollywood. And over the past few years there has been another resurgence of talented English directors working very much off the beaten path, like Paul King (Paddington and Paddington 2), Andy Serkis (Breathe, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle), Steve McQueen (the Small Axe films), and the wide-ranging Andrew Haigh (Looking, 45 Years, Lean on Pete, and The North Water).
The true wizard among this crop is the Anglo-Japanese Will Sharpe, who made the best movie I saw in 2021. is the biography of an idiosyncratic Victorian illustrator (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), whose protosurrealist drawings of cats had the unexpected effect of revolutionizing their role in English domestic life. (They had never been thought of as pets until Wain’s sketches provoked readers of into falling in love with them.) By turns charming and poignant, suggests a classic Victorian children’s story crossed pictures. Also in 2021, the industrious Sharpe co-wrote (with its creator, Ed Sinclair) and directed a four-part series for British TV called , which dramatizes an obscure true story about a married couple, Christopher and Susan Edwards, who were convicted in 2014 of murdering her parents, William and Patricia Wycherley, fifteen years earlier and sentenced to prison for life, but have persisted in maintaining their innocence.
