Category Archives: Film

Santa Fe abuzz as residents wonder: what caused Gene Hackman’s death?

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New Mexico town shocked by deaths of actor, wife and dog – but answers to critical questions may take time to emerge

As New Mexico authorities investigate the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, their adopted home town of Santa Fe is grappling with the mystery of what happened to the couple.

Hackman, a Hollywood legend with two Academy Awards picked up over a 60-year career, and Arakawa, a classical pianist, had lived in the area for decades and had embraced the close-knit community that is New Mexico’s capital city.

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‘I chose to NOT follow the gutless rules’: Francis Ford Coppola says he’s ‘thrilled’ by Golden Raspberry votes

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Veteran film-maker defends his sci-fi epic Megalopolis as it scores two Razzies from nominations that included ‘worst picture’

Francis Ford Coppola has said he was “thrilled” to accept multiple Golden Raspberry nominations for his film Megalopolis, which ended up winning two awards.

On Instagram, Coppola said that he was treating the nominations, which are voted for by Razzie members, who pay for the privilege, as a “distinctive honour … when so few have the courage to go against the prevailing trends of contemporary moviemaking!”

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Indian cinema chain sued by film-goer over lengthy pre-film ads

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Court orders compensation to be paid to 30-year-old from Bangalore, saying ‘in the new era, time is considered as money, each one’s time is very precious’

For some, the adverts that precede the start of a film are the bane of a trip to the cinema; for others, they are a useful buffer as you stand in the popcorn queue.

But for one man in India, the lengthy marathon of cinema advertising was so infuriating that he took the matter to the courts – and won.

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Karla Sofía Gascón to attend Oscars despite tweet controversy

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The Emilia Pérez best actress nominee will be at Sunday’s ceremony with Netflix paying for all expenses incurred

The Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón is reportedly set to attend this Sunday’s Oscars after controversy over bigoted tweets.

The Spanish actor, who is nominated for best actress, had been removed from the campaign trail by Netflix after resurfaced tweets led to a backlash.

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Thousands of children in England accused of witchcraft in past decade

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Figures emerge as Kindoki Witch Boy film tells true story of Mardoche Yembi who underwent an exorcism as a child

Thousands of children in England have been accused of witchcraft over the past decade, according to new figures that come alongside a film released on Monday.

Faith-based abuse is a worldwide phenomenon but experts found 14,000 social work assessments linked to witchcraft accusations since 2015. In the year running to March 2024 alone, there were 2,180 assessments linked to witchcraft.

Children accused of witchcraft can call Childline on 0800 1111 or NSPCC on 0808 800 500.

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Sag awards 2025: Timothée Chalamet, Demi Moore, Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña win major categories

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Screen Actors Guild awards go to Shōgun and Conclave ensembles, while Jane Fonda gives a rousing political speech while accepting a life achievement award

Timothée Chalamet has won best actor in a surprise upset at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild awards for his performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, with Demi Moore and the ensembles of Shōgun and Conclave also winning big.

Chalamet won best male actor in a leading role, his first in an awards race that has been led all season by The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody, who has picked up the Golden Globe, Bafta and Critics’ Choice awards and is still widely predicted to win the Oscar next week.

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‘He targeted me’: Guy Pearce says he ‘sobbed’ over Kevin Spacey encounters

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The Oscar-nominated actor has said he is attempting to be more candid about his former co-star’s alleged behaviour

Guy Pearce, the actor Oscar-nominated for his role in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, has opened up about his experiences when working with Kevin Spacey on 1997 film LA Confidential.

Pearce had previously been oblique about his time with Spacey, who has been dogged by accusations of sexual misconduct, which Spacey has always denied, calling him “a handsy guy” in 2018. But speaking on Hollywood Reporter’s podcast Awards Chatter, the actor said he was now attempting to be franker about his co-star’s alleged behaviour.

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UK copyright law consultation ‘fixed’ in favour of AI firms, peer says

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Exclusive: Beeban Kidron says plans will lead to ‘wholesale’ transfer of wealth from creative industries to tech sector

A consultation on changes to UK copyright law is “fixed” in favour of artificial intelligence companies and will lead to a “wholesale” transfer of wealth from the creative industries to the tech sector, according to a crossbench peer campaigning against the mooted overhauls.

Beeban Kidron said the government was undermining its own growth agenda with proposals to let AI companies train their algorithms on creative works under a new copyright exemption.

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Emilia Pérez wins top Spanish film prize amid Karla Sofía Gascón furore

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Best European film at Goya awards goes to musical at centre of storm over past social media posts written by its star

The multi-Oscar-nominated narco-musical Emilia Pérez, whose success has been overshadowed by the emergence of a series of racist and Islamophobic social media posts written by its star, Karla Sofía Gascón, won best European film at Spain’s prestigious Goya awards on Saturday night.

Gascón, the first out transgender woman to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, stayed away from the ceremony after posts came to light in which she called George Floyd “a drug addict swindler”, denigrated China, and said Islam was “becoming a hotbed of infection for humanity”.

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Aacta awards 2025: Robbie Williams’ Better Man and Boy Swallows Universe dominate Australian film and TV prizes

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Singer biopic wins best film and best actor for motion capture star Jonno Davies, while Trent Dalton adaptation wins in 12 of its 22 nominated categories

The Netflix adaptation of Trent Dalton’s bestseller Boy Swallows Universe has dominated the annual Aacta (Australian Academy of Cinema, Television and the Arts) awards, winning 12 of its record-breaking 22 nominations.

The Aacta president, Russell Crowe, hosted the awards ceremony at Hota (Home of the Arts) on the Gold Coast on Friday, which featured a live performance by Robbie Williams, whose musical biopic, Better Man, collected nine awards on the night.

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‘I was deeply upset’: Karla Sofía Gascón to miss Spanish ‘Oscars’ as storm over racist tweets continues

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The actor was due to attend the Goya awards on Saturday but has pulled out and has also been dropped by publishers

Karla Sofía Gascón will not attend this weekend’s prestigious Goya awards as the fallout from the Spanish actor’s racist and Islamophobic social media posts continues with her being dropped by her publisher and criticised by prominent politicians.

Gascón – the star of Emilia Pérez and the first transgender woman to be nominated for a best actress Oscar – is already understood to have been removed from the film’s campaigning materials by its studio, Netflix. Her comments have been described as “absolutely hateful” by the movie’s director, Jacques Audiard, while Gascón’s co-star, Zoe Saldana, has said the views expressed had saddened and disappointed her.

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Makeup artist tried to remove Adrien Brody’s nose by mistake on set of The Brutalist

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Actor says nose mistaken for prosthetic by new makeup artists: ‘I said, ‘That doesn’t come off!’

A makeup artist on The Brutalist tried to remove Adrien Brody’s nose believing it to be a prosthetic, the actor has revealed.

Speaking to Jimmy Fallon earlier this week, Brody said that a new makeup artist began “busily working away with a solvent on my nose”.

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BBC and ITV slash big-budget TV spend as US streamers pour money into UK

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Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky also among UK broadcasters making cuts as Netflix, Disney and Amazon pile on pressure

UK broadcasters slashed their spending on big-budget TV shows to the lowest level in almost a decade last year, even as their US rivals Netflix, Disney and Amazon ploughed hundreds of millions more into British-made premium content.

In a sign of the increasing competitive pressures of the streaming era, the amount spent on high-end TV shows costing more than £1m an hour to make by domestic operators such as the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky, plunged by a quarter last year to £598m.

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Emilia Pérez director criticises Karla Sofia Gascón’s ‘inexcusable’ tweets

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Oscar nominee Jacques Audiard has called the social media behaviour of the actor ‘hateful’ in a new interview

The director of Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard, has responded to the controversial unearthed tweets of his Oscar-nominated star Karla Sofía Gascón, branding them “hateful”.

The French film-maker, who is also nominated for the best director Oscar, has expressed disappointment over the social media behaviour of Gascón, who had shown bigoted views towards people of colour, Muslims and increased diversity at the Oscars.

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Mexicans make Emilia Pérez parody poking fun at French stereotypes

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Spoof fires back at supposed inauthenticity of Oscar-tipped screen musical with a song-and-dance tale of boulangeries at war

The war of words between Mexico and France over trans gangster musical Emilia Pérez has heated up even more after the release of a spoof film called Johanne Sacreblu poking fun at French stereotypes.

Emilia Pérez, directed by Jacques Audiard and which is up for the best picture Oscar along with a best actress nomination for its star Karla Sofia Gascón, is the story of a cartel boss who hires a lawyer (played by Zoe Saldana) to enable a gender transition, and has attracted much criticism in Mexico, where it is supposedly set.

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Cult London film venue Prince Charles cinema under threat of closure

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Much loved for its screenings of hard-to-find films, the venue claims its landlord wants to alter lease, leaving it able to shut down the business

The Prince Charles cinema in central London, long a site of pilgrimage for those interested in cult and hard-to-find films, has launched a petition saying its existence is under threat from its property developer landlords.

In a statement on petitions website 38degrees.org.uk, the cinema says that Zedwell LSQ Ltd (who are owned by developers Criterion Capital) are demanding a “break clause” in the building’s lease, which is currently being negotiated as the current lease ends in September. The cinema says this means they would be on six months’ notice to leave if Zedwell decides to redevelop the site.

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Irish-language cinema has bright future despite Oscars snub, says Kneecap director

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Comedy film loosely based on lives of Belfast hip-hop trio missed out on nominations for best international feature and original song

Hollywood may not have been quite ready to see Kneecap “walking down the red carpet smoking a joint” but the makers of the comedy biopic about the hip-hop trio say it has shown there is a “bright future” for Irish-language cinema and an indigenous industry in Belfast.

The producers of the film – which is named after the group – and their family and friends turned out to watch the Academy Awards nominations announcement in Madden’s bar in Belfast with the band tuning in on Zoom from London, where they are recording a new album.

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Academy says Oscars will go on as planned and ‘honor’ LA amid fires

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Letter from Academy leadership also says show will ‘move away’ from live performances to celebrate songwriters

The Oscars will go on as planned in March, though with special accommodations to acknowledge to devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, according to a new update from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

A letter from the CEO, Bill Kramer, and president Janet Yang, sent to all members on Wednesday, confirmed that the ceremony will “celebrate the work that unites us as a global film community and acknowledge those who fought so bravely against the wildfires”.

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‘Animals can feel good and evil’: film puts new perspective on Ukraine war

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Collection of seven shorts due out in 2025 tells story of conflict from perspective of animals

The occupying Russian soldiers paid little attention to the elderly woman shuffling through the farmland surrounding the villages outside Kyiv, taking her goat to pasture. But she was focused closely on them. After locating their positions, she headed back home with the goat, and later called her grandson, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, to give the coordinates.

The story is one of seven episodes, based on real events from the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion but lightly fictionalised, that make up a feature film about the war in Ukraine, due out later this year. All seven of the shorts have one thing in common: they tell the story of the conflict from the perspective of animals.

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Joan Plowright, celebrated star of stage and screen, dies aged 95

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Actor helped shape British postwar theatre through her performances at the Royal Court, National Theatre and in the West End

• Michael Billington: Plowright was a dynamic force
• Joan Plowright: a life in pictures

The actor Joan Plowright, who was celebrated for her long career in theatre and film, has died at the age of 95, her family have announced.

Plowright won acclaim for performances during the early years of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court and the National Theatre when it was based at the Old Vic and led by her second husband, Laurence Olivier.

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