We Don't Need Two Metaphors

Now almost a decade into his feature filmmaking career, perennial London Film Festival favourite Ben Wheatley returns with Happy New Year, Colin Burstead : perhaps his warmest film to date and a perfect sweary antidote to the usual festive offerings. Colin Burstead (an excellent Neil Maskell) has hired a grand Dorset castle to bring his family together for a New Year's party. Like every family, they don't always get along but the Burstead are perhaps more resentful than most. So far so Agatha Christie but there's no chance of the butler being murdered here as the Burstead family are far too embittered to actually murder anyone; it’s as if their resentment for each other would only be exceeded by the resentment towards someone who no longer had to endure the curt and strained conversations.

A spiritualist, an artist and a geologist walk into a abandoned mining town. Even if you have heard of that joke before, you’ve probably never heard it told in quite the same manner as Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn tell it in their latest. Funded through Kickstarter, Two Plains & a Fancy is the first self-proclaimed ‘spa western’, which is an accurate description that doesn’t begin to hint at what is to come. It’s 1893 and the aforementioned trio (Marianna McClellan, Benjamin Crotty, Laetitia Dosch) have travelled to Colorado in search of the region's famous hot springs. What they don't know is that the price of silver has abruptly fallen the once thriving region is facing a severe downturn.