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In ways both literal and figurative, the face plays a central role in The Girl with the Needle, Magnus von Horn’s unsparing black-and-white drama about a woman whose life spirals from bad to worse after an unexpected pregnancy. What does a face show and hide? Is there even such a thing as a trustworthy face? The film opens with a tone-setting montage of disfigured faces that portends the societal decay of post-World War I Copenhagen—a rot that becomes apparent in the story as it increasingly infects a young woman facing motherhood.

The film proper begins on Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), who believes that her husband died in the war, being evicted from her flat by her landlord (Per Thiim Thim) because of overdue rent. Things would seem to take a turn for the better for the woman when she becomes pregnant by Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), the well-to-do owner...

Like one of those fiendish knots that tighten the more you squirm, director Magnus von Horn’s Cannes competitor The Girl With the Needle builds to a devastating climax, taut as piano wire.

Danish actress Vic Carmen Sonne (Holiday, Godland) offers an understated but multi-layered performance as Karoline, a vulnerable but resilient seamstress living in post-World War I/early-1920s Copenhagen, who is left high and dry when her wealthy lover (Joachim Fjelstrup) gets her knocked up but won’t marry her. That leaves Karoline with only two options: give herself a bathtub abortion with a knitting needle or have the baby and hand it over to Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), a sinister candy-store owner who runs a backstreet adoption agency.

Shot digitally, in black and white and using a claustrophobic 3:2 ratio by rising cinematographer Michal Dymek (A Real Pain, Eo), the film has the haunted, eerily still poise of antique photographs,...

Stars: Rafe Spall, Joel Fry, Steve Speirs, Thomas W. Gabrielsson, Tim Woodward, Benedikte Hansen, Simone Lykke | Written by Jeff Murphy | Directed by Adrian Shergold

I believe it was the Beatles who once said “all you need is Rafe Spall” or something to that effect anyway… I have made no secret of the fact that when I find an actor or actress I like, I will go out of my way to watch them. It is a select group though, the likes of your Paddy Considine, Stephen Graham, Vicky McClue, Tom Hardy, Joe Gilgun to name a few (notice these are all Brits). The type of leading actors that can let a whole scene play out over their faces and not say a great deal but have me on the edge of my seat having heart palpitations. Another such actor who has been on my radar for some time now, and...

The BBC's remake of The Lady Vanishes distanced itself rather too well from Hitchcock's classic film

The Lady Vanishes (BBC1) | iPlayer

It's Kevin (BBC2) | iPlayer

Our Queen (ITV1) | ITV Player

Who can say why the BBC suddenly decided to remake The Lady Vanishes, though it must have seemed a fair bet that only film buffs – and perhaps not the ones in the habit of dropping by for Call the Midwife at this time on a Sunday night – would remember more than the opening credits of the original 1938 Hitchcock adaptation (scrolling jerkily over a railway hobbyist's layout of a station and hotel nestling in the snow-capped Balkans, which must have looked almost real at the time). In the event they avoided plot familiarity by cunningly going back to the forgotten 1936 novel (The Wheel Spins) by Ethel White, thus dispensing with Hitchcock's gunfight at the end, his comic characters and egregiously providential turns of fortune.