Film star and California governor pictured at scene of accident in which police confirm one woman taken to hospital
Arnold Schwarzenegger has reportedly been involved in a multi-vehicle crash that resulted in a woman being taken to hospital.
The former bodybuilder and governor of California was pictured at the scene, in photos shared by the TMZ website, in Los Angeles on Friday afternoon.
Continue reading...With his new film Parallel Mothers, the director dials down the camp to address the shadow of fascism hanging over his homeland
Pedro Almodóvar is in Madrid at his production company El Deseo (The Desire). El Deseo could not be a more fitting name: desire has been at the heart of his films. All sorts of desire: for love, sex, justice, acceptance and truth. Behind him are DVDs, books and a phalanx of awards. He has five Baftas, five Goyas and is the only Spanish director to have won two Oscars (best foreign film in 1999 for All About My Mother and best original screenplay for Talk to Her in 2002).
He is sitting on a purple chair, wearing a pink jumper, his hair quiffed into a punky white meringue. You suspect that every colour in Almodóvar’s life has been carefully handpicked – just as in his films. His back is ramrod straight, his manner both warm and regal. Almodóvar is a man used to being in control, and today there is a translator (despite his fluent English), assistant and publicist at his service. When I met Almodóvar previously, in Madrid in 2004, he was tense throughout our conversation, and only began to relax after the interview. At the end, he gave me a copy of a calendar I had admired, featuring pictures he had shot on location. He signed it “Things are simpler and yet more complicated”. Somehow, it seems to sum up his films and worldview perfectly.
Continue reading...Owners want to bring venue up to date while maintaining heritage of cinema that first opened in 1909
In the 112 years since it began, the Electric cinema in Birmingham has lived through the history of film-making. When it first opened its doors in 1909 it showed silent movies with a piano backing, rolling newsreels and cartoons in the 30s, adult films in the 60s, and blockbusters in the 80s.
But the Covid pandemic nearly marked the end of what is believed to be the UK’s oldest working cinema when its owners decided to sell up after more than a year of continuous closure.
Continue reading...Scandals affecting Armie Hammer, Kevin Spacey and Johnny Depp have all hit their movies. We look at how film companies cope when leading players’ box-office stock crashes
Does Armie Hammer ever yearn for the time when the worst thing people said was that nobody liked him? “Ten Long Years of Trying to Make Armie Hammer Happen” was the cruel but incisive headline of a 5,000-word BuzzFeed article from 2017 which concluded that only a wealthy white man could not merely have withstood so much failure but have been rewarded for it. The US actor tweeted about the piece, calling it “bitter AF” before making a celeb’s exit from the social media platform: he deleted his account then quietly reactivated it.
Those must seem now like halcyon days. Hammer’s fall began a year ago when messages surfaced online, purportedly sent from him to various extramarital partners, suggesting an erotic interest in cannibalism. Sexual assault allegations were made by multiple women, while an accusation of rape prompted a Los Angeles police investigation. Hollywood tends to act fast when handling a scandal in the age of social media and #MeToo: Hammer was dropped immediately by his agents, William Morris Endeavor. He exited projects including the Jennifer Lopez romcom Shotgun Wedding, Amma Asante’s cold war thriller Billion Dollar Spy and The Offer, a 10-part series about the making of The Godfather. His scenes in Taika Waititi’s soccer comedy Next Goal Wins were reshot with Will Arnett taking his place.
Continue reading...As his new film Nightmare Alley hits cinemas, the possessor of Hollywood’s most piercing stare gets the ranked treatment
Dafoe wasn’t natural casting as the clerkly TS Eliot in this literary biopic, which chronicled the poet’s troubled first marriage – and it showed, despite his customary actorly intelligence. If nothing else, it proved that, his highbrow credentials notwithstanding, Dafoe wasn’t really cut out for the anglophile heritage pics that littered the 1990s.
Continue reading...Kelly Duda faces fascist-era charge of ‘offending the honour or prestige’ of prosecutor in case alarming free speech advocates
An American film-maker has been put on trial in Italy for “offending the honour or prestige” of an Italian prosecutor after testifying in a criminal case against a former health ministry chief and representatives of a pharmaceutical company accused of supplying Italians with tainted blood products.
Kelly Duda, who revealed how contaminated blood taken from prisoners in Arkansas was sold around the world, faces up to three years in prison if found guilty of an offence that dates back to Italy’s fascist period.
Continue reading...Cesar-winning star of A Very Long Engagement and Hannibal Rising involved in accident in the Alps
The French actor Gaspard Ulliel has died at the age of 37 after a skiing accident.
The star of A Very Long Engagement and Hannibal Rising was hospitalised after the accident in the Alps. Ulliel was transported via helicopter on Tuesday to Grenoble but did not survive his injuries, according to the actor’s family and agent.
Continue reading...In Kenneth Branagh’s acclaimed drama, Dornan plays a penniless father whose astonishing good looks pass without comment. It’s not the first time the film industry has asked audiences to ignore an actor’s attractiveness
Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast clearly owes a debt to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Both films are named after places. They’re both autobiographical. They’re both filmed in black and white for maximum awards season impact. And yet the films differ in one key area. Cuarón, for the most part, filled his film with authentic-looking non-actors. Branagh, meanwhile, filled his with Jamie Dornan.
Which is no slight on Dornan. In recent years he’s proved himself to be one of our most charismatic and magnetic actors. Put a camera on Jamie Dornan and audiences won’t look away. Except in Belfast, he’s playing the down-at-heel dad of a family barely able to stay afloat. At one point he is almost sunk by a £500 tax bill. Which would be all too believable, save for the fact that Jamie Dornan looks like Jamie Dornan. If Belfast was set in any recognisable universe, then one of Dornan’s neighbours would have said, “Have you ever thought about becoming a model?”, or “I saw you singing Everlasting Love to professional standards in the club the other night, you could try doing that for a living”, or “You know what would get you out of this pickle? Playing a literal sex god in the movie adaptations of a wildly successful erotic novel series?” And he would have said yes and, because he is Jamie Dornan, all his debts would have been paid off by lunchtime.
Continue reading...Did the iconic three-note sequence come from Stravinsky, the Muppets or somewhere else? Our writer set out to – dun, dun duuuun! – reveal the mystery
There’s surely only one thing that unites Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the 1974 comedy horror Young Frankenstein and The Muppets’ most recent special on Disney+. Regrettably, it is not Kermit the Frog. The thing that appears in all of these works has no easily recognisable familiar name, although it is perhaps one of the most recognisable three-beat musical phrases in history. It starts with a dun; it continues with a dun; it ends with a duuun!
On screen, a dramatic “dun, dun duuun” has appeared in everything from Disney’s Fantasia to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to The IT Crowd. In 2007, a YouTuber scored a video of a melodramatic prairie dog with the three beats, earning over 43m views and a solid place in internet history. Yet though many of us are familiar with the sound, no one seems to know exactly where it came from. Try to Google it and … dun, dun, duuun! Its origins are a mystery.
Continue reading...Whedon denies allegations of threats and cruelty detailed by Buffy and Justice League actors, saying he has been made to seem like an ‘abusive monster’
Joss Whedon, Buffy creator and director of films including The Avengers and Justice League, has responded to multiple allegations of misconduct, denying claims from actors including Gal Gadot and Ray Fisher that he threatened and belittled them on set.
In a lengthy interview with New York magazine, Whedon responded to the stream of allegations made against him, which began to gain momentum in 2020 when Fisher detailed his experiences on the set of Justice League. Whedon stepped in to direct the film after the departure of Zack Snyder.
Continue reading...The Handmaid’s Tale actor on her crush on Clint Eastwood and selling frozen food over the phone
Born in Massachusetts, Ann Dowd, 65, appeared in the films Lorenzo’s Oil and Philadelphia, and had various roles in the TV series Law & Order. She received award nominations for her performances in the 2012 film Compliance and the HBO series The Leftovers. Since 2017, she has played Aunt Lydia in the drama series The Handmaid’s Tale, winning an Emmy. Her more recent movies include Hereditary and Rebecca; her latest, Mass, is in cinemas and on Sky Cinema from January 20. She is married to actor Lawrence Arancio; they have three children and live in New York City.
Aside from a property, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought?
My children’s education.
In his new film Nightmare Alley, the Oscar-winning director abandons fantasy for gritty noir – but, as he knows from his childhood, humanity has its own share of monsters
Guillermo Del Toro used to describe Hollywood as “the Land of the Slow No”. Here was a place where a director could die waiting for a project to be greenlit. “The natural state of a movie is to be unmade,” he says over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “I have about 20 scripts that I lug around that no one wants to make and that’s fine: it’s the nature of the business. It’s a miracle when anything at all gets made.”
Nevertheless, Del Toro has established himself as this century’s leading fantasy film-maker, more inventive than latter-day Tim Burton and less bombastic than Peter Jackson (with whom he co-wrote the Hobbit trilogy). From the haunting adult fairytale Pan’s Labyrinth and the voluptuously garish Hellboy romps to his beauty-and-the-fish love story The Shape of Water, which won four Oscars, he is the master of the glutinous phantasmagoria.
Continue reading...Actor’s phone is turned over to authorities investigating fatal shooting on New Mexico film set in October
Alec Baldwin has handed over his cellphone to investigators who are looking into the fatal shooting on the New Mexico set of the film Rust in October, his attorney and a law enforcement official said.
A search warrant for Baldwin’s iPhone was issued in December. The Santa Fe County, New Mexico, sheriff’s office had said earlier this week that it was still trying to obtain the device from the 30 Rock actor.
Continue reading...Guardian photographer Sarah Lee describes her experience as a stills photographer on the set of the joint British-German Netflix production starring Jeremy Irons
Munich, based on the Robert Harris novel, is a German-British TV production that was filmed in Germany and subsequently in England in late 2020. I was invited to join the crew as an on-set stills photographer for the UK leg of shooting.
We started in Liverpool, which was doubling for 1930s London. The historic Liver Building, which stood in for Gotham city in the forthcoming Batman movie, made a very convincing Whitehall. The production later moved south to Amersham in Buckinghamshire where we shot in historic houses used as sets for Chequers and Downing Street.
Liverpool doubled for 1930s London – with the historic Liver Building making an impressive substitute for Whitehall
Continue reading...Susan Sarandon and Mark Ruffalo among signatories to letter supporting Harry Potter actor accused of antisemitism
Major figures from the world of film, including Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Capaldi and Charles Dance have issued a statement in support of Emma Watson and Palestinian solidarity.
Last week, Watson, best known for playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter franchise, was accused of antisemitism after she posted an image on Instagram showing a photograph of a pro-Palestinian protest with the banner “solidarity is a verb” written across it. It was accompanied with a quote about the meaning of solidarity from the intersectional feminist scholar Sara Ahmed.
Continue reading...Lebanese film-makers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige explain how their experiences of war shaped their new film – and how art freed them
On 4 August 2020, a catastrophic explosion ripped through Beirut’s main port and into the city. In total, 218 people were killed. At the time, around 6pm, the artist and film-maker Joana Hadjithomas was in a cafe with a friend, around the corner from the studio she shares with her husband. The first thing she heard was a strange sound. “My friend and I just looked at each other. Instinctively, we went underneath the table. I curled up and protected my face.” As a teenager, she had lived through Lebanon’s civil war; taking cover was second nature, a survival reflex. Then came the massive blast.
Afterwards, walking back to her apartment, she had no idea what was happening. An attack? An explosion? It was beyond comprehension. People were covered in blood; there was dust and rubble everywhere. “Wherever you looked, everything was destroyed. The scale was terrifying,” she says. In a state of shock, Hadjithomas had left her phone behind. When her husband, Khalil Joreige – frantic with worry – telephoned a couple of minutes later and a police officer answered, he feared the worst. Joreige tells the story with a shrug of helplessness, his face crumpling at the memory.
Continue reading...Answering readers’ questions, the hardman actor discusses his bust-up with Jean-Claude Van Damme, his degree in chemical engineering – and ham sandwiches
If someone said: here’s loads of money, but we get the right to CGI you into movies for ever after you die, would you accept? LarboIreland
I’ve been in about 80 movies already. I guess part of being an actor is there’s some immortality. That’s why people are interested in showbusiness, because you kind of live for ever. So maybe I would. It depends how bad the movies are.
Continue reading...Alfred Hitchcock described his third film, The Lodger, as the true beginning of his directorial career but it would prove a near fatal screen debut for its leading light June Tripp
December 1925 was a busy month for June. A fixture of the West End stage since childhood, her surname, Tripp, had been excised by the impresario Charles B Cochran because it “sounds a bit comical for a dancer”. She spent the days rehearsing for a musical, Kid Boots, the evenings starring in another, Mercenary Mary, and then would “rush to the studio at midnight”, to act in a horse-racing short film opposite the fading American film star Carlyle Blackwell. The studio was at Poole Street, Islington, in north London, built five years earlier by Paramount but now rented out, most often to a British company, Gainsborough, run by Michael Balcon.
The short, Riding for a King, starred the celebrated jockey Steve Donoghue and had its premiere in January 1926, with June in attendance. Two days later, she collapsed during a performance of Mercenary Mary and shortly after underwent an appendectomy. Daily Express readers subsequently learned that she would “not be able to dance for six months”. By February, she was recuperating on the Riviera. It was there that she received a telegram from her old friend Ivor Novello, who offered film work. “No dancing required. You will act beautifully and we shall have fun.”
Continue reading...Camilla Nielsson’s thrilling documentary takes a behind-the-scenes look at the 2018 election that followed the ousting of Robert Mugabe
“A free, fair and credible election.” These words of promise echo throughout Camilla Nielsson’s riveting documentary, capturing the fervour of the 2018 presidential vote in Zimbabwe, the country’s first without Robert Mugabe since its independence.
While opening with the rip-roaring rallies for Nelson Chamisa, who is running for the presidency against the incumbent Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s former aide, President is more than an intimate portrait of a charismatic opposition leader. Considering the fraudulent electoral practices that existed under Mugabe’s 30-year reign, this election concretises a collective cry for democracy to triumph over decades of corruption and lies. Such a desire, alas, comes with blood, sweat and tears.
Continue reading...Jane Campion’s colossal western and Steven Spielberg’s passionate West Side Story revival head up a list that snubs more transgressive offerings
So the much-disgraced Golden Globes, derided for a lack of diversity and transparency in the voting membership, lucrative TV coverage cancelled, gravy-train derailed and the awards ceremony dwindled to a virtual event on social media, carries paradoxically on with delivering a set of awards that are in perfectly plausible good taste and not very much different from all the other un-disgraced awards ceremonies. However, it was sad to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s dazzling comedy of transgression Licorice Pizza overlooked, of which more in a moment.
Jane Campion’s handsome, complex and brilliant western drama The Power of the Dog gets best picture (drama) and best director, along with best supporting actor for the excellent Kodi Smit-McPhee, while Steven Spielberg’s glorious, passionately respectful revival of West Side Story wins best picture in the musical or comedy section, along with its breakout player Ariana DeBose for best supporting actress and newcomer Rachel Zegler for best actress in musical/comedy.
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