Category Archives: Film

The Hand of God review – Paolo Sorrentino tells his own Maradona story

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The Italian film-maker may owe his life to the footballer, as this vivid, autobiographical Neapolitan drama reveals

Paolo Sorrentino’s extravagantly personal movie gives us all a sentimental education in this director’s boyhood and coming of age – or at any rate, what he now creatively remembers of it – in Naples in the 1980s, where everyone had gone collectively crazy for SSC Napoli’s new signing, footballing legend Diego Maradona. We watch as a family party explodes with joy around the TV when Maradona scores his handball goal in the 1986 World Cup. A leftwing uncle growls with pleasure at the imperialist English getting scammed.

This is a tribute to Sorrentino’s late parents, who in 1987 died together of carbon monoxide poisoning at their holiday chalet outside the city, where 16-year-old Paolo might himself also have been staying had it not been that he wanted to see Napoli playing at home. So maybe Maradona saved his life, but it was a bittersweet rescue. The hand of God, after all, struck down his mum and dad and spared him. Newcomer Filippo Scotti plays 16-year-old Fabietto (that is, Sorrentino himself) at the centre of a garrulous swirl of family members. Toni Servillo plays his dad, Saverio, and Teresa Saponangelo gives a lovely performance as his mother, Maria, with a skittish love of making practical jokes.

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Alec Baldwin shooting: investigators track source of live ammunition on Rust set

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Police search Albuquerque firearms supplier after owner claimed he ‘may know’ where live rounds came from

Authorities are pursuing new leads on possible sources of live ammunition involved in actor Alec Baldwin’s fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the New Mexico set of a western, as they searched the premises of an Albuquerque-based firearms and ammunition supplier.

The search took place after a provider of firearms and ammunition to the ill-fated movie production Rust told investigators that he “may know” where live rounds came from, describing ammunition he received from a friend in the past that had been “reloaded” by assembly from parts.

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Edie Falco: ‘Alcohol was the answer to all my problems – and the cause of them’

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One of TV’s most admired actors, she is now playing Hillary Clinton on screen. She discusses overcoming addiction, her adoration for Sopranos co-star James Gandolfini and the pure joy of adopting two children

Edie Falco has never been the type of actor to demand entourages and encores. Fanfares and fuss are just not her bag, and she has little time for pretentious thespiness. When other actors talk about their “Process,” as she puts it – with a capital P – she thinks, “What are you talking about?!” With her open, thoughtful face and wide smile, she looks as if she could be your friend from the local coffee shop, as opposed to one of the most accoladed American actors of this century, having accumulated two Golden Globes, four Emmys and five Screen Actors Guild awards, plus a jaw-dropping 47 nominations. This impression of straightforwardness and – oh dreaded word – relatability has made her subtle performances of self-deceiving characters even more powerful. As the mob wife, Carmela, in The Sopranos, she could tell Tony (James Gandolfini) what she thought of him staying out all night with his “goomahs”, or mistresses, but she couldn’t admit to herself that he does much worse to fund the life she loves. Similarly, as Nurse Jackie, in the eponymous TV series, her scrubbed clean face and sensible short hair belied her character’s drug addiction.

So it feels extremely right that, when we connect by video chat, Falco, 58, is sitting – not in a fancy hotel room, or a Hollywood mansion, but in the endearingly messy basement of her New York house, where she lives with her son, 16, and daughter, 13. Power tools hang off the wall behind her, and she is leaning on a table strewn with what she describes as “God knows, some stuff”.

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There Is No Evil review – passionate plea against Iran’s soul-poisoning executions

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Dissident Mohammad Rasoulof blasts against his country’s profligate use of capital punishment that includes making citizens carry out death sentences

Maybe you don’t go to Iranian cinema for nail-biting action and suspense. But that’s what you are given in this arresting portmanteau film, the Golden Bear winner at last year’s Berlin film festival. It is written and directed by film-maker and democracy campaigner Mohammad Rasoulof, who has repeatedly been victimised by the Iranian government for his dissident “propaganda” – most recently, in 2020, with a one-year prison sentence and two-year ban on film-making. As with Rasoulof’s fellow Iranian director Jafar Panahi, a ban of this sort can be finessed, by playing on the government’s strange pedantry and hypocrisy. If the film is technically registered to someone else and shown outside Iran at international film festivals where its appearance boosts Iran’s cultural prestige, the authorities appear to let it slide, though persist with harassment.

There Is No Evil consists of four short stories – with twists and ingeniously concealed interconnections – on the topic of the death penalty and how it is poisoning the country’s soul. Hundreds of people are executed a year in Iran, including children. Execution of the condemned criminal is the job of civilian functionaries but also widely carried out by soldiers doing compulsory national service.

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Vale David Dalaithngu: the inimitable actor who changed the movies, and changed us

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The star has left behind a profound body of work – and a permanent, inimitable impression on his industry

In the 1976 classic Storm Boy, the great Yolŋu actor David Dalaithngu delivers a line that became immortalised in Australian cinema. “Bird like him, never die,” he says, describing the pelican Mr Percival.

The substance of that line can apply to the man himself, who will live on through the light and shadow of the cinema, on to which he left a permanent and inimitable impression.

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House of Gucci is ‘painful and insulting’, says Gucci family

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Heirs of Aldo Gucci issue statement taking issue with Ridley Scott’s film but have stopped short of legal action

Surviving family members of the Gucci fashion dynasty have expressed unhappiness with their representation in the new film House of Gucci.

In a statement issued on Monday, the heirs of Aldo Gucci – who ran the fashion house for 33 years until the mid-1980s – said they were aggrieved by the lack of consultation by film-makers, as well as their portrayal as “thugs, ignorant and insensitive to the world around them”.

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‘I owe an enormous debt to therapy!’ Rita Moreno on West Side Story, dating Brando and joy at 90

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She overcame racism and abuse to break Hollywood, romanced Brando, dated Elvis to make him jealous, fought hard for civil rights and won an Egot. Now in her 10th decade, she is busier and happier than ever

Rita Moreno pops up on my computer screen in a bright red hat, huge pendant necklace and tortoiseshell glasses. “Well, here I am in my full glory,” she says from her home in Berkeley, California. And glorious she sure is. Moreno is a couple of weeks short of her 90th birthday, but look at her and you would knock off 20 years. Listen to her and you would knock off another 50.

Can I wish you an advance happy birthday, I ask. “Yes, you can. Isn’t it exciting?” Moreno is one of the acting greats. But she could have been so much greater. She is one of only six women to have bagged the Egot (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards), alongside Helen Hayes, Audrey Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg and Liza Minnelli. Yet she has spent much of her career battling typecasting or simply not being cast at all.

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Searches for Gucci label soar after release of murder film starring Lady Gaga

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Designer brand reaps the benefit of Ridley Scott’s movie telling the story of the killing of firm’s ex-boss

When is murder good for business? When it is made into a Hollywood movie, for one – and when that film stars Lady Gaga. House of Gucci, the Ridley Scott feature released last week to mixed reviews, has sent interest in the Gucci brand soaring.

Searches for Gucci clothing were up 73% week on week, according to e-commerce aggregator Lovethesales.com on Friday, with a leap of 257% for bags and 75% for sliders. The figures suggest that the luxury brand stands only to gain from Hollywood’s telling of the story ofthe glamorous Patrizia Reggiani, who hired a hitman in 1995 to kill her ex-husband Maurizio Gucci, the former head of the fashion label.

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House of Gucci review – Lady Gaga steers a steely path through the madness

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Gaga rules in Ridley Scott’s at times ridiculous drama based on the true-life sagas of the Italian fashion dynasty

“The most Gucci of them all” is how Patrizia Reggiani described herself in a 2014 interview and, judging by this entertainingly ripe, comedically tinged tragedy, she has a point. Variously known as “Lady Gucci” and “Black Widow”, Reggiani became the centre of a very 1990s scandal involving lust, money, fashion, murder… and a clairvoyant. To that tabloid-friendly cocktail, Ridley Scott’s latest “true story” potboiler adds a dash of pop superstardom, with Lady Gaga (Oscar- nominated for her close-to-home performance in A Star Is Born) relishing the chance to find the human cracks beneath a larger-than-life, femme fatale surface.

Adapted by screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna from the nonfiction book by Sara Gay Forden, House of Gucci charts a crowd-pleasing course from the Milanese party scene of the 1970s to a high-profile, end-of-the-century trial. At its heart is the doomed romance between Patrizia and Maurizio Gucci, the latter played behind stylishly studious glasses by cinema’s sexy nerd de nos jours, Adam Driver. “I want to see how this story goes,” says Patrizia, embarking upon a twisted fairytale romance with the grandson of Guccio Gucci that starts with masked balls and talk of midnight chimes and pumpkins and ends with family back-stabbings, jealous rages and deadly rivalries.

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‘I have an outsider’s perspective’: why Will Sharpe is the A-List’s new favourite director

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The actor-director won a Bafta for his performance in Giri/Haji. Hailed as a star in the making by Olivia Colman​ and others, he discusses the true stories that inspired his new projects behind the camera

Will Sharpe has only been surfing a couple of times, but he really loved it. “So I’m not a surfer, I’m not very good at it, I’ve been twice,” clarifies the 35-year-old English-Japanese actor, writer and director. “But there’s something about being in this huge, loud, ‘other’ force and I never feel calmer than when I’m underwater in the sea. I just really took to it.”

Sharpe sees parallels with his work, which has so far included the surreal, darkly funny sitcom Flowers starring Julian Barratt and Olivia Colman that he created for Channel 4, and a magnetic performance as sarcastic, self-destructive Rodney in the BBC drama Giri/Haji, which earned him a Bafta in 2020 for best supporting actor. “When I came back to writing, having been surfing, I found myself reflecting on how there are certain similarities: you have to get everything technically right, but you’re still at the mercy of this much greater power,” he says. “And how 95% of the time you are getting the shit kicked out of you, but the 5% of the time that it works, it’s so exhilarating you just want to do it again straight away.”

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The stars with Down’s syndrome lighting up our screens: ‘People are talking about us instead of hiding us away’

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From Line of Duty to Mare of Easttown, a new generation of performers are breaking through. Meet the actors, models and presenters leading a revolution in representation

In the middle of last winter’s lockdown, while still adjusting to the news of their newborn son’s Down’s syndrome diagnosis, Matt and Charlotte Court spotted a casting ad from BBC Drama. It called for a baby to star in a Call the Midwife episode depicting the surprising yet joyful arrival of a child with Down’s syndrome in 60s London, when institutionalisation remained horribly common. The resulting shoot would prove a deeply cathartic experience for the young family. “Before that point, I had shut off certain doors for baby Nate in my mind through a lack of knowledge,” Matt remembers. “To then have that opportunity opened my eyes. If he can act one day, which is bloody difficult, then he’s got a fighting chance. He was reborn for us on that TV programme.”

It’s a fitting metaphor for the larger shift in Down’s syndrome visibility over the past few years. While Call the Midwife has featured a number of disability-focused plotlines in its nearly decade-long run – actor Daniel Laurie, who has Down’s syndrome, is a series regular – the history of the condition’s representation on screen is one largely defined by absence.

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Stellan Skarsgård: ‘My tips for fatherhood? Don’t lie. Even about Santa Claus’

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The Swedish actor best known for his collaborations with Lars von Trier – as well as Marvel movies, Pirates of the Caribbean and Mamma Mia! – answers your questions about Lars von Trier, porn and pickled herrings

Are you ever frustrated with having to wear clothes when you’re working? Do you feel you’re better at your job if you’re able to be naked? KayBee123

I usually take off my clothes when I get home but I have no special ambition to be naked on screen. And I’m getting fewer and fewer offers. I don’t know what that means.

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How a dream coach helped Benedict Cumberbatch and Jane Campion put the unconscious on screen

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Kim Gillingham explains how her work on The Power of the Dog enabled the ‘lioness of an artist’ and her ‘translucent’ star to access their inmost drives

To access his dreams the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí napped while sitting on a chair, holding keys over an upturned metal plate. After he lost consciousness, the keys dropped onto the plate, jangling him awake so he could paint fresh from his unconscious. Kim Gillingham tells this story to connect her practice to the history of artistic endeavour. She is a Jungian dream coach, based in LA, who combines ideas from psychoanalysis and the method acting of the Actors Studio to, in her words: “access the incredible resource of the unconscious through dreams and through work with the body and to use that material to bring authenticity, truth and aliveness up through whatever discipline the artist is working in”.

Jane Campion sought Gillingham’s services to help conjure the forces at play in her first film in 12 years, The Power of the Dog. It’s a western adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel that riffs on themes of masculinity and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank, a toxic alpha cowboy whose personality is designed to hide a secret that would have made him vulnerable in the story’s setting of 1920s Montana.

The Power of the Dog is streaming now on Netflix.

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Film-maker Julia Ducournau: ‘Women kicked serious ass this year’

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Only the second woman to win the ​prestigious ​Palme d’Or, the French director behind Raw and new film Titane discusses the boom in female-led horror and ​how she’s terrified of being booed

“When I see a stereotype,” says French director Julia Ducournau, “I try to kill it.” She certainly did that in July by winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival. The most revered and exalted award in cinema, a world away from the erratic glossiness of the Oscars, the Palme d’Or tends to honour films that both further the language of cinema and shed light on the loftier questions of earthly existence. You expect humanism, seriousness, perhaps a dash of difficulty. What you don’t expect is in-your-face sexuality, serial slaughter, a ferocious, electrically coloured techno-metal aesthetic – and radical DIY nasal surgery.

But that’s what you get in Ducournau’s Titane – only the second Palme d’Or winner by a female director, the first being Jane Campion’s shared win with The Piano in 1993. Her win, says Ducournau in transatlantically inflected English, “was incredibly powerful to me. Through this prize, a lot was happening. It took 28 years [since Campion’s win] and I believe it’s not going to take 28 years again.” She points to 2021’s award successes for women – Chloé Zhao at the Oscars with Nomadland, Venice winner Audrey Diwan (Happening), Romania’s Alina Grigore in San Sebastián (Blue Moon). “That can’t be looked past. Women kicked serious ass this year.”

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‘I just can’t believe it exists’: Peter Jackson takes us into the Beatles vault locked up for 52 years

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Ahead of his epic series Get Back, the director reveals the secrets of 60 hours of intimate, unseen footage of the Fab Four – and why it turns everything we know about their final days upside down

When the world closed down in March 2020, most of us had to make do with pretending to enjoy video calls with friends or baking bread. Peter Jackson, meanwhile, was busy sifting through a mountain of unseen footage – 60 hours in total – of the Beatles, shot by the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg in 1969.

His four-year project is now finished – “we finally completed it on Friday,” says a relieved-looking Jackson from his home in New Zealand – and the resulting series, The Beatles: Get Back, will be released on Disney+ from 25 November. Originally envisaged as a feature film, Covid uncertainty saw plans revised. It is now three two-hour episodes, using the mass of outtakes from Lindsay-Hogg’s work on what would become Let It Be, the band’s fourth feature film.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘Doing Hamilton every night saved me. It kept my head from getting off the swivel’

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When his Broadway show became a global phenomenon, the rigours of daily performance kept the actor and songwriter grounded. Then Disney and Hollywood came calling. Now, the ‘musical theatre fanboy’ has returned to his first love


About halfway through Tick, Tick ... Boom!, the new movie directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the patrons of a diner in 90s New York all turn to the camera and sing. The movie, Miranda’s directorial debut, is based on the autobiographical stage show of the same name by Jonathan Larson (creator of Rent) and tells the story of Larson’s late 20s as a struggling writer and waiter. Andrew Garfield is extraordinary in the lead, but it’s the people around him who make this particular scene; as the number unfolds, it becomes apparent that every extra in the diner is a legend of musical theatre, from Bernadette Peters, to Brian Stokes Mitchell (a veteran Tony award winner), to Roger Bart (original cast, Tick, Tick ... Boom!), to Jim Nicola (former artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop) to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Joel Grey, chasing the waiter for the bill. “I don’t know that I’m the guy you hire to make your next Marvel movie,” Miranda says, speaking via video from his office in uptown New York, “but I am the guy you hire to make this musical about a guy who wrote musicals.” It is simultaneously funny, moving and monstrously self-indulgent – or, as Miranda puts it, “about as musical theatre nerdy as it can get.”

Imagining Miranda as the steward of an alternate Marvel universe – Comic-Con, but for musical theatre geeks – restores him to what, prior to the opening of Hamilton in 2015, was his quieter role in the cultural landscape: as the champion of a much-loved, much-mocked art form that rarely troubled mainstream popular culture. Hamilton changed all that. The show not only won 11 Tonys, a Pulitzer, and more than $850m in box office receipts, it conferred on Miranda a singular status, variously crediting the 41-year-old with reanimating history, diversifying Broadway, and provoking children all over the world to memorise large chunks of lyrics about America’s revolutionary politics, some of them concerned with the restructuring of the national debt. (“Hey yo, I’m just like my country / I’m young, scrappy and hungry / And I’m not throwing away my shot” – still being hammered out at a million barmitzvahs). The most surprising thing about all this, perhaps, is that Miranda, appearing today in his customary flat cap and goatee, has the boundless enthusiasm and apparent absence of cynicism of the aspiring artist still untouched by success.

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Marry Me: do you take the J-Lo/Owen Wilson romcom to be the weirdest film of 2022?

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Jennifer Lopez proposes to Owen Wilson, a maths teacher she’s never met. What was she thinking? How will it end? And does anyone care?

Nobody really wants it to be 2021, do they? A vicious global pandemic is about to enter its third year, the world is on fire and populist politics threatens to overturn democracy as we know it. Some people have reacted to these terrible times by trying to change things. Others are willing themselves back to a more innocent era.

By “others”, I mean Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, who are doing their level best to make it 2005 again. How? By making a romcom, that’s how. If this was a decade and a half ago, then Marry Me would automatically be one of the biggest hits of the year, bringing together the unstoppable forces responsible for Maid in Manhattan and Wedding Crashers. But it isn’t 2005, it’s 2021, and the thought of watching Lopez and Wilson shuffle through a romcom together is baffling. Perhaps it’d help to go through the Marry Me trailer beat by beat.

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‘It was mind-boggling’: Richard Gere on the rescue boat at the heart of Salvini trial

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Exclusive: the Hollywood actor, who lawyers have listed as a key witness, describes scenes of desperation on the Open Arms vessel

The Hollywood actor Richard Gere has revealed for the first time the full story behind his mercy mission to the NGO rescue boat Open Arms as he prepares to testify as a witness against Italy’s former interior minister and far-right leader, Matteo Salvini, who is on trial for attempting to block the 147 people onboard from landing in Italy.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Gere, 72, who lawyers have listed as a key witness to the situation aboard the NGO rescue boat Open Arms, described the scenes of desperation he saw when he arrived on the vessel being held off the Italian island of Lampedusa in the summer of 2019 with conditions rapidly deteriorating.

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Who ya gonna call? Ivan and Jason Reitman on resurrecting Ghostbusters together

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Tears were inevitable when Hadley Freeman finally met the man behind her favourite film, and his son, who has made a belated second sequel. But few expected them to flow quite so freely

It’s not always easy for a famous parent to pass the baton to the next generation. Kirk Douglas bristled when he realised the young women approaching him no longer wanted to flirt with him, but to ask for his son Michael’s phone number. When her daughter Christina was cast in a soap opera but then hospitalised for an ovarian cyst, Joan Crawford snatched the role for herself. The narcissism that underlies the need for fame is not usually conducive to happy parenting.

Ivan Reitman – director and producer of many of the most beloved mainstream comedies of the 70s, 80s and 90s, including Animal House, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Twins and Dave – is a different kind of famous parent.

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