Category Archives: Film

Gugu Mbatha-Raw: ‘It’s a misconception that people act to get attention’

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Shaped by her father’s early life in apartheid South Africa, the actor brings political awareness to all of her roles, from Black Mirror and The Morning Show to the new BBC thriller The Girl Before

As those of us who have spent more time than usual at home over the last couple of years will know, those four walls can be a sanctuary, prison or, at times, both. Beautiful, monolithic and eerily empty, the house in the new BBC/HBO drama The Girl Before is definitely both. “The house,” says Gugu Mbatha-Raw with a laugh, “is the real star.” At one point in the first episode, Mbatha-Raw’s character Jane appears to have developed an intense relationship with it, caressing its smooth stone and glass.

In The Girl Before, adapted from the bestselling psychological thriller by JP Delaney, Jane passes a rigorous vetting process before being allowed to rent this minimalist dream home. In return for cheap rent, she has to agree to around 200 strange and stringent rules set by the architect and owner. “No books?” she says, incredulous, when the estate agent reels off some of the stipulations (no pictures, no ornaments, “no children, obviously”). Jane will be watched, her every move and metric monitored, even her moods influenced, by the technologically advanced house and its creepy creator. She soon finds out that she is the second tenant – and she makes a chilling discovery about the first, Emma (played by Jessica Plummer).

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Javier Bardem: ‘When I won the Oscar, I felt great, but it didn’t make any sense’

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Famed for portraying bad guys in Skyfall and No Country for Old Men, the Spaniard opens up about his marriage to Penélope Cruz, his formidable mum, and his hopes for his kids

The bad news is that, at the last minute, my interview with Javier Bardem is changed from being a face-to-face encounter to one conducted by the less risky means of video chat (damn you, Omicron!) But the good news is this means I get to snoop around Bardem’s home in Madrid, where he Zooms me from, and which he shares with his wife, the actor Penélope Cruz, and their two children, Leonardo, 10, and Luna, eight. OK, I don’t actually see the whole house, but he does give me a panoramic view of his study while his kids shout and play outside.

“You can see my little bookcase here,” Bardem says, picking up his laptop and giving me the grand tour. “And my map of the world. It’s very chaotic.”

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Search warrant issued for Alec Baldwin’s phone over Rust shooting investigation

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Investigators say there could be evidence on the star’s iPhone relating to the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins

A search warrant has been issued for Alec Baldwin’s phone in the investigation into October’s fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the actor/director’s film Rust, according to New Mexico court documents.

The search warrant and accompanying affidavit were filed on Thursday in Santa Fe county magistrate Court nearly two weeks after a New Mexico prosecutor overseeing the probe said some of the individuals who handled guns on the film set may face criminal charges in the death of Halyna Hutchins.

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I challenged Tom Cruise to send me two of his special cakes for Christmas. Did he deliver? Of course he did

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Every Christmas, the actor sends an extreme white chocolate coconut gateaux to close friends – by private jet, it turns out. This year, those friends include me. Twice

Reader, I am here to inform you that dreams do come true. You really can have anything your heart desires, with the proviso that you’re prepared to aggressively and repeatedly abuse your position in order to get it. What I’m trying to say is this: my year-long campaign to get Tom Cruise to send me a cake has ended in success.

Roughly a year ago, I wrote a short piece about Cruise’s habit of sending $50 (£38) white chocolate coconut bundts to his closest friends at Christmas. Kirsten Dunst, Henry Cavill, Angela Bassett, Jimmy Fallon, Graham Norton and scores of other high-profile figures all receive a cake, lovingly made by Doan’s Bakery in California and shipped out by Cruise’s staff. I finished my article by hoping that I would one day be important enough to receive such a wonderful gift.

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Golden Globes 2022 tries to do better as Lady Gaga brings the outrage

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After a year of criticism over diversity, the Golden Globes have come up with a decent slate of nominees, with Gaga surely the favourite for best actress

• Full list of 2020 nominations

The Golden Globes nomination list has been announced with a solemn introduction from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s president Helen Hoehne, to the effect that the Globes’ much-criticised controlling body was “trying to be better” and that its constituent membership was more diverse than at any other time in its history. Which is better, I suppose, than being less diverse than at any time in its history.

At any rate, leading the pack are Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s unashamed heartwarmer about the home town of his early childhood, with seven nominations and Jane Campion’s stark, twisty western-Gothic psychodrama The Power of the Dog, set in 1920s Montana with Benedict Cumberbatch as the troubled, angry cattleman who begins a toxic duel with his new sister-in-law played by Kirsten Dunst and her sensitive teenage son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.

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Adam McKay: ‘Leo sees Meryl as film royalty – he didn’t like seeing her with a lower back tattoo’

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After politics in Vice and finance in The Big Short, director McKay is taking on the climate crisis in his star-studded ‘freakout’ satire Don’t Look Up

Adam McKay calls it his “freakout trilogy”. Having tackled the 2008 financial crash and warmongering US vice president Dick Cheney in his previous two movies, The Big Short and Vice, McKay goes even bigger and bleaker with his latest, Don’t Look Up, in which two astronomers (Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a giant comet headed for Earth, but struggle to get anyone to listen. It is an absurd but depressingly plausible disaster satire, somewhere between Dr Strangelove, Network, Deep Impact and Idiocracy, with an unbelievably stellar cast; also on board are Meryl Streep (as the US president), Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, Mark Rylance, Jonah Hill and Ariana Grande. It has been quite the career trajectory for McKay, who started out in live improv and writing for Saturday Night Live, followed by a run of hit Will Ferrell comedies such as Anchorman, Step Brothers and The Other Guys. “The goal was to capture this moment,” says McKay of Don’t Look Up. “And this moment is a lot.”

Was there a particular event that inspired Don’t Look Up?
Somewhere in between The Big Short and Vice, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] panel and a bunch of other studies came out that just were so stark and so terrifying that I realised: “I have to do something addressing this.” So I wrote five different premises for movies, trying to find the best one. I had one that was a big, epic, kind of dystopian drama. I had another one that was a Twilight Zone/M Night [Shyamalan] sort of twisty thriller. I had a small character piece. And I was just trying to find a way into: how do we communicate how insane this moment is? So finally, I was having a conversation with my friend [journalist and Bernie Sanders adviser] David Sirota, and he offhandedly said something to the effect of: “It’s like the comet’s coming and no one cares.” And I thought: “Oh. I think that’s it.” I loved how simple it was. It’s not some layered, tricky Gordian knot of a premise. It’s a nice, big, wide open door we can all relate to.

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How Maradona inspired Paolo Sorrentino’s film about Naples, Hand of God – and inadvertently saved his life

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The Italian director’s new, semi-autobiographical film reveals a charming and rarely seen side of his home city

‘This, for me, is the most beautiful place on Earth,” Paolo Sorrentino told Filippo Scotti, the actor playing the director’s younger self in his latest film, as their 1980s Riva speedboat chopped the waves of the Bay of Naples. Their view stretched from the precipitous peninsula of Sorrento all the way west towards Posillipo. The two promontories flank the sprawling port city, offering a warm embrace to all those who disembark there. Sorrentino’s new film, the Hand of God, opens with that same view: the sun-mottled bay, whose peace is disturbed by the sound of four Rivas as they speed towards the shore. The film is both a love letter to, and a portal into, Paolo Sorrentino’s Naples.

In cinemas now and on Netflix this week, The Hand of God sees the Academy award-winning director return to his home city for the first time since One Man Up, his 2001 debut. Sorrentino tells the story of his own coming of age, up to the moment when his life is shattered by the death of his parents in a tragic accident. Sorrentino’s story is a tale of great grief, loss and perseverance, set in a middle-class part of Naples, a far cry from the impoverished neighbourhoods shown in the city’s other recent portraits: Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend or the mafia-focused Gomorrah series.

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Those we lost in 2021: Roger Michell remembered by Kate Winslet

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5 June 1956 – 22 September 2021
The actor, who worked with the Notting Hill director on 2019’s Blackbird, recalls a warm and egoless man who always knew how to get the best out of his cast

Being a director was so secondary to who Roger was as a man in the world. He was just such a grounding, warm, extraordinary presence. I say this with affection, but some directors make it known that they’ve just walked into the room. Roger wasn’t like that. He didn’t need to be needed. He didn’t have an ego. He just wanted to be part of a team – creating little families, little families of people working together.

I had known Roger for a long time before we worked together on a film – Blackbird, in 2019. We’d worked together once before, in 2005, on an American Express commercial. A few years prior to that, The Mother [his 2003 film with Daniel Craig and Anne Reid] had completely taken my breath away. It was so natural, so crushingly real. It felt like the first time in a long time that any of us had seen actors in a film appearing not be “acting” at all. That was one of Roger’s most impressive skills: his capacity to get actors to just be. To just be and not act.

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Naomie Harris says ‘huge star’ groped her during audition

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Bond actor recalls past #MeToo incident and contrasts lack of censure with ‘immediate’ removal on recent project

The Oscar-nominated actor Naomie Harris has said a #MeToo incident on one of her recent projects prompted the “immediate” removal of the perpetrator, as she recalled another occasion when she was groped by a “huge star” who faced no censure.

Harris, who played Moneypenny in the last three Bond films and was up for an Oscar for her role in Moonlight in 2017, declined to name either of the men allegedly responsible.

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Maggie Gyllenhaal: from ‘difficult’ roles to lauded Hollywood director

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With a string of plaudits for portraying complex characters, the actor is now focusing her ‘quiet fire’ behind the cameras with a stunning debut film

From her breakthrough role in Secretary, wearing stilettos, a pencil skirt and manacles and attempting to operate a stapler with her chin, to her directorial debut which digs into the messy truths about motherhood, Maggie Gyllenhaal has always been attracted to what she has described as “troubled women. The ones that are a real challenge. They really need me.”

It’s a quote that really gets to the heart of what distinguishes Gyllenhaal. An Oscar-nominated actor, and now– with her Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter – an award-winning screenwriter and director, she is drawn to the kind of women whose stories don’t usually get told. She delves into the uncomfortable angles and sharp edges of her characters and found her niche by not quite fitting into the mould.

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Don’t Look Up review – an A-list apocalyptic mess

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Adam McKay’s star-studded climate change satire with Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence et al lands its gags with all the aplomb of a giant comet

A comet is on a collision course with Earth. The targets in this shrill, desperately unfunny climate change satire directed by Adam McKay are more scattershot. According to stoner PhD student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her professor, Dr Randall Mindy (a self-consciously tic-y Leonardo DiCaprio), the asteroid is the size of Mount Everest and due to hit in six months.

The pair try to warn Meryl Streep’s President Orlean about the impending “extinction-level event”, only to find her preoccupied by the midterm elections. They attempt to raise awareness on breakfast TV, but anchors Jack and Brie (Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett) can’t help but give their bad news a positive spin. The only person with enough money to intervene is tech entrepreneur Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), who wants to mine the comet for its “$140tn worth of assets”. Party politics, celebrity gossip and social media memes are swiped at too. It feels cynical, then, when Timothée Chalamet shows up with no real narrative purpose other than to snog Lawrence.

In cinemas now and on Netflix from 24 December

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Carrie-Anne Moss: ‘There was a scene in the first Matrix with me in stilettos. I could barely stand straight’

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Twenty years after first playing kick-ass hacker Trinity in The Matrix, Moss is returning to the role in The Matrix: Resurrections. Thankfully, she wasn’t asked to wear heels this time …

When The Matrix asks us all to take the red pill again on 22 December, Carrie-Anne Moss, 54, will return to the role that made her famous. Moss first played Trinity, a motorbike-riding, badass, PVC-clad hacker, in 1999, and despite the character not surviving the original trilogy, she is back, along with her co-star Keanu Reeves, for the fourth instalment, The Matrix Resurrections, directed by Lana Wachowski, this time without her sister Lilly. Moss, who was born in Canada, started her career as a model and had several small parts on television and in films before The Matrix struck gold. She played Marvel’s first on-screen lesbian character, Jeri Hogarth, in the Netflix series Jessica Jones, and away from the acting world, she runs a “labour of love” lifestyle site called Annapurna Living. She lives with her husband and three children in the countryside in California, which means she does not see the current trend for Matrix-inspired fashion such as big stompy boots and tiny sunglasses out on the streets.

Was returning to the world of The Matrix a tough decision?
Oh, no. I was absolutely over-the-moon excited about the prospect. It was something that I never imagined happening. People had mentioned it to me in passing, and I was always thinking: ‘No way. Never gonna happen.’

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And Just Like That: bad jokes are the least of its problems

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Some franchises cannot endure, it turns out – but, happily, old box sets live forever

Good sex, like good comedy, relies on timing, and maybe, 17 years after the original show ended, 11 years after the second film departed cinemas, Sex and the City no longer has its finger on the clitoris when it comes to timing. “And Just Like That, It All Went Wrong” was the New York Times’s verdict on the wildly publicised, moderately anticipated SATC follow-up series, And Just Like That, which debuted its first two episodes this week. The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan described it as at times “excruciating”.

Certainly the jokes are bad. Not “Lawrence of my labia” bad, as Samantha (Kim Cattrall) notoriously said in Sex and the City 2. But a far cry from the spit-out-your-wine-with-laughter-and-shock level of the original show, which ran from 1998 to 2004. And that’s the least of its problems.

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Madness in their method: have we fallen out of love with actorly excess?

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The Succession star Jeremy Strong has been widely scorned after a magazine profile revealed his ‘preening’ and ‘self-indulgent’ acting process. But many actors have been lauded for their method – so what has changed?

Robert De Niro is the greatest actor of his generation. So claimed the headline in a popular magazine last year, and it’s not a controversial claim. The evidence offered for this opinion was the same that’s always wheeled out when discussing De Niro’s acting: “[He] took method acting to previously uncharted levels. He got a New York cab licence for Taxi Driver, learned Italian and lived in Sicily to prepare for The Godfather Part II, put on 60lbs to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, learned Latin for True Confessions and the sax for New York, New York. He was the hardest-working man in Hollywood,” wrote the journalist.

For decades, this has been the general feeling about actors: the more method, the better. After all, if they don’t eat raw bison and sleep in an animal carcass (Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant), stay in a wheelchair and be spoonfed by the crew (Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot) or lose so much weight that they start to go blind (Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club), they’re just playing make-believe. And why should they get all that fame, adoration and money just for that? All of the above actors were rewarded for their efforts with an Oscar, and actors talking about their method efforts has become as much a part of the run-up to the Oscars as shops playing Do They Know It’s Christmas in the run-up to the holidays.

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‘I’d stop stockpiling toilet paper’: Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance and Tyler Perry on their end-of-the-world plans

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The stars of Adam McKay’s apocalypse satire Don’t Look Up discuss their worst fears, their favourite conspiracy theories and their final moments on Earth

If a massive meteor were expected to collide with Earth in six months’ time, what would our leaders do? Everything in their power to stop it? Or everything possible to leverage it for political and financial gain?

How about the rest of us? How would we cope with the prospect of impending apocalypse? By facing the end of the world with sobriety and compassion? Or drowning ourselves in sex, drugs and celebrity gossip? Might some of us even enjoy the drama?

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Steven Spielberg on making West Side Story with Stephen Sondheim: ‘I called him SS1!’

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The legendary director used to get scolded by his parents for singing its songs at the dinner table. As his version hits the big screen, he talks about his own dancefloor prowess – and the ‘obscure movie club’ he formed with Sondheim

It’s a winter afternoon and you’re about to begin a video call with Steven Spielberg. The perfect opportunity, then, to make a quick brew in your Gremlins mug (Spielberg produced that devilish 1984 horror-comedy) then brandish it in front of the webcam for the director’s benefit. “Oh, I love that, thank you,” he says, chuckling softly. Then he wags a cautionary finger: “Don’t drink it after midnight!”

The most famous and widely cherished film-maker in history is all twinkling eyes and gee-whiz charm today. He is about to turn 75 but first there is the release of his muscular new take on West Side Story, which marks his third collaboration with the playwright Tony Kushner, who also scripted Munich and Lincoln. Spielberg is at pains to point out that this not a remake of the Oscar-laden movie but a reimagining of the original stage musical. “I never would have dared go near it had it only been a film,” he says. “But, because it’s constantly being performed across the globe, I didn’t feel I was claim-jumping on my friend Robert Wise’s 1961 movie.”

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David Thewlis on new show Landscapers and the misogyny of Naked: ‘I find it much tougher to watch today’

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As he stars alongside Olivia Colman in a drama about the Mansfield Murders, the actor talks about his discomfort with Naked, doing night shoots with Julie Walters – and growing old grotesquely

David Thewlis, speaking by Zoom from his home in the Berkshire village of Sunningdale, has set his screen at a jaunty angle. His manner is equable, nerdy, eager to please. Nothing like what you’d expect, in other words – unless you had watched Landscapers, a new four-part TV drama in which Thewlis stars opposite Olivia Colman. Perhaps he’s one of those actors who doesn’t de-role until he’s on to the next character.

Landscapers is true crime, in so far as the protagonists are Susan and Christopher Edwards, the so-called Mansfield Murderers convicted in 2014 of killing Susan’s parents and burying them in the garden 15 years before. Yet it is absolutely nothing like true crime. It jumps through time and genre, smashes the fourth wall then puts it back together as a jail cell. It is vividly experimental yet recalls the golden age of British TV, specifically Dennis Potter and his dreamlike, restless theatricality. “I didn’t think of that while we were making it,” says Thewlis. “But when I saw it, I thought of The Singing Detective – which I was in!”

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Michael Sheen declares himself a ‘not-for-profit actor’

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Actor and activist announces he will use future earnings to fund social projects after ‘turning point’ of organising 2019 Homeless World Cup

Hollywood star Michael Sheen has said he is now a “not-for-profit actor” after selling his houses and giving the proceeds to charity.

The actor and activist, 52, said organising the 2019 Homeless World Cup in Cardiff was a turning point for him. When funding for the £2m project fell through at the last moment, Sheen sold his own houses to bankroll it.

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‘I could have done with eight more hours’: readers on the Beatles documentary epic Get Back

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Peter Jackson spent four years editing down 60 hours of unseen footage into the new three-part documentary series. Was it worth the wait?

As a younger Beatles fan who grew up with the idea that the band were falling apart in January 1969, Get Back was a joy. My immediate thought was how bright and vibrant everything looked, compared with the graininess of the original Let It Be film. It could have been shot yesterday – apart from the outfits and hairstyles. While not exactly a big revelation for those of us who never believed that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles, it’s great to see that her presence here didn’t upset Paul, George and Ringo nearly as much as it seemed to upset commentators. We see absolutely no evidence of her “interfering”, as has been claimed over the years, and I loved McCartney’s prescient remark that in 50 years’ time people would be saying the Beatles broke up “because Yoko sat on an amp”.

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Can artistic freedom survive in Sudan? The writing’s on the wall…

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The recent coup dashed hopes raised by the end of the military regime but newly liberated artists refuse to submit quietly

In the new dawn of a heady post-revolutionary era, Suzannah Mirghani returned in 2019 to the country of her birth for the first time in years. Her mission was to shoot a short film on Sudanese soil. It proved unexpectedly straightforward.

“When the revolution happened, there was this exuberance,” she says, from her Qatari home. “When we came to make our film, we were given the green light. We were told: ‘Anything you want’.

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