Love and war may be huge themes, but Sebastian Faulks approaches them from a microscopic perspective. He detects love in the minute movements of a woman's fingers; in a man's manner of crawling through trenches, he captures fear and torment. Faulks is involved in a romance with detail, charging every

Epic, Intense, Pathos, Realist fiction, Sensual, Violent

When artists come together in a spirit of union, they inevitably need a pulpit from which to expound their theories. For the Brits making films in the late '40s and early '50s, that pulpit was Sequence. Many filmmakers of the Free Cinema Movement and the British New Wave found the pages of this journ

Dark, Lyrical, Violent, Visceral, Young british/kitchen sink/free cinema

If Britain had a blacklist during the Thatcher era, Ken Loach was on it. Pound the pavement though he might, he couldn't persuade anyone to fund his films. His made-for-TV documentaries met with steep resistance -- in fact, his depiction of the 1984 coal miners' strike was banned outright. Why? Loach

British documentary movement, Gritty, Industrial, Intense, Political, Sincere, Violent, Young british/kitchen sink/free cinema

Most artists, at one time or another, fall out of public favor. But few have fallen so completely, so dramatically, and so fast from the zenith as Michael Powell. From its glory days of the '40s, his career saw a premature burial when British film fell in love with gritty realism in the '60s and '70s

Distorted, Hyperrealism, Perverse, Pioneering, Quirky, Violent