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.
Continue reading...He has been detained at airports and told never to return to Iran. But the director, who could be about to win his third Oscar, refuses to be silenced about outrages in his own country – and in the west
Withdrawing your film from the Oscars would be career suicide for most directors, but in November Asghar Farhadi appeared to do precisely that. Shortly after Iran’s state-controlled film board put his movie, A Hero, up for the best international feature Oscar, Farhadi released a statement on Instagram saying he was “fed up” with suggestions in Iranian media that he was sympathetic to the country’s hardline government. “If your introduction of my film for the Oscars has led you to the conclusion that I am in your debt,” he wrote, “I am explicitly declaring now that I have no problem with you reversing this decision.”
Farhadi, it could be argued, can afford to make such a gesture. He has already won two international feature Oscars – for A Separation in 2012 and The Salesman in 2017 – and many more awards besides (A Hero won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year). Such achievements inevitably convey national hero status. At the same time, he seems to have trodden a careful line when it comes to his country’s oppressive regime. Other Iranian film-makers, such as Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, have paid a heavy price for criticising aspects of Iranian society, from prison sentences and house arrests to travel bans. Farhadi seems to have been spared similar treatment. Hence the accusations that he was “pro- government”.
Continue reading...Jane Campion’s Netflix drama and HBO hit triumph as stars distance themselves from Hollywood Foreign Press Association
The Power of the Dog and Succession were the big winners at an unusual, stripped-back Golden Globes.
Traditionally, the ceremony is a glitzy telecast with A-listers in attendance but after a year of controversies surrounding diversity and amoral practices, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lost its footing in the industry, with publicity firms, studios and celebrities choosing to distance themselves.
Continue reading...She has played the Queen and a gangster’s moll but her latest casting has sparked controversy
Nobody is quite what they seem. And actors? Well, for actors that’s the job. Dame Helen Mirren, as well as being herself for 76 years, has by now notably been Lady Macbeth, a London gangster’s moll, a thief’s wife, an alcoholic cop, an action hero, Prospero and also a British monarch at least four times. Now she takes on Golda Meir, the late prime minister of Israel, in a new biopic, and the casting has caused controversy.
The choice of a non-Jewish actor to star as a woman with such a prominent place in the history of Israel has prompted irritation on both sides of the argument. Another illustrious dame, Maureen Lipman, was first to raise the issue – or “blast” Mirren, according to some reports last week – and then Dame Esther Rantzen defended the director’s choice. It is the latest instance of a ‘Jewface’ row, a backlash to the assignment of a major Jewish role to someone not from that minority background.
Continue reading...Paul Gardner bagged himself a rare interview with Robert De Niro for the Observer Magazine of 7 August 1977 (‘Making It – the man from Mean Streets’).
Gardner had met De Niro in Rome for the filming of Bertolucci’s 1900 – ‘an extravagant tapestry of Italian history’ – but was rebuffed. Then three years later he caught up with him in Hollywood, De Niro having spent five months on Martin Scorsese’s film musical New York, New York.
Continue reading...Critics haven’t been kind to Adam McKay’s eco-satire, but many climate experts are lauding it. Here four give their views
Rarely has a film been as divisive as Adam McKay’s climate satire Don’t Look Up. Although it has been watched by millions, and is already Netflix’s third most watched film ever, the response from critics was largely negative. Many found its story of scientists who discover an asteroid heading for Earth a clumsy allegory for the climate crisis, while others just found it boring. But many in the climate movement have praised the film, and audience reviews have been generally positive.
We asked four climate experts to give their views on the film. Warning: spoilers ahead.
Continue reading...His roles in films like To Sir with Love mirrored my own experiences, and made me rethink what was possible
As a young kid, there really weren’t many black figures to aspire to, to mould yourself to. I was always glued to the telly and one night my dad put on this film, In the Heat of the Night. I will always remember the moment when Sidney Poitier came on screen as Virgil Tibbs. Seeing any black person on TV was extraordinary, but seeing someone with such ability, such grace, such style, changed me.
I knew how bad racism was in the US at that time, and watching that film I feared for this black character in that world. But there’s a moment where an older white gentleman, Endicott, slaps Tibbs, and he immediately slaps him back in the face. There was an audible gasp in our living room, quickly followed by cheers. It was a thing we’d never seen before – he was standing up, he was strong, and he wasn’t taking any shit.
David Harewood is an actor
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