Category Archives: Film

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

Kodi Smit-McPhee: ‘You can still be strong, no matter how you look and carry yourself’

Posted on by

Despite the presence of an unusually menacing Benedict Cumberbatch unnerving all on set, it’s this young Australian actor’s otherworldly stillness that lights up Jane Campion’s western psychodrama

Jane Campion’s psycho-sexual western The Power of the Dog is a tremendous film but it is the power of Kodi Smit-McPhee that really adds bite to its bark. The 25-year-old Australian actor has been a fragile, hypnotic presence, with an eerie knack for stillness and intensity, ever since his earliest performances. At the age of 10, he played a boy coping with the desertion of one parent and the breakdown of the other in Romulus, My Father. At 12, he trudged through a post-apocalyptic hell-scape in The Road, then fell in love with a vampire at 13 in Let Me In, the US remake of the Swedish horror hit Let the Right One In. Even his multiplex movies, such as the X-Men outings (Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix) in which he played the blue-skinned Nightcrawler, have felt that bit stranger thanks to his delicate, androgynous features and those pool-sized anime eyes set far apart on his face.

His uncanny quality is crucial to Campion’s movie, which is set in early 2oth-century Montana. Smit-McPhee plays the gangly, effeminate Peter, who spends his days crafting intricate paper flowers and sketching dead animals. His life is destabilised when his mother (Kirsten Dunst), a widowed innkeeper, takes up with a new partner. It is not this stepfather (Jesse Plemons) who poses a threat so much as his sadistic, bullying brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), who taunts Peter and mocks the way he “creeps all over the place, big eyes goggling”.

Continue reading...

Meg Ryan films – ranked!

Posted on by

As the great romcom queen turns 60, we select her best roles from the low-budget indies to the Tom Hanks big-hitters

By 2007, Meg Ryan was already well into a wilderness period that still hasn’t ended. Indeed, it has been more than five years since she was in a film at all (Ithaca, her harmless but forgettable directorial debut). If highlights of this era have been few, her restrained, affecting turn as an unhappily married, cancer-stricken housewife in this uneven indie soap opera was a reminder that the industry did her dirty. At the very least, more little films like this could use her wattage.

Continue reading...

Rust script supervisor recalls moment of Alec Baldwin film shooting – video

Posted on by

Mamie Mitchell has said she relives the sound of the gun going off on the set of Rust 'over and over again'. Mitchell, who was the first to call 911 after the shooting, has filed a lawsuit against Alec Baldwin and the film's producers, alleging that the script never required the actor to fire the shot that killed the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured the director Joel Souza

Continue reading...

Gaga, Gucci and prison ferrets: how true crime conquered the world

Posted on by

Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci stars Lady Gaga in a tale of fashion and murder. But is true crime – once the soul of cinema, from thrillers and horrors to westerns – now outgrowing the big screen?

What took you so long, House of Gucci? This story was destined to become a movie from the moment the bullet left fashion heir Maurizio Gucci dead outside his Milan office in March 1995 – shot, a witness said, by a hitman with a “beautiful, clean hand”. The film by Ridley Scott now finally arrives dripping with star power, and Lady Gaga as Gucci’s ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani. But the story alone was enough: a glittering tickbox of money, revenge and a villainess kept company in jail by an illicit pet ferret called Bambi.

True crime gold. So why, now that the film is actually here, does the Gucci case feel a strange fit for a movie after all? Put it down to timing. The film’s development began in entertainment prehistory: 2006. Back then, a lavish movie was still the grand prize for any news story, and true crime – that trashbag genre – would simply be glad of the association. Now though, film and true crime have the air of an estranged couple. Had Maurizio Gucci been gunned down on Via Palestro last week, Netflix would already have the rights and the podcast would be on Spotify.

Continue reading...

Harry Potter cast return to Hogwarts to mark 20th anniversary of first film

Posted on by

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone stars Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson discuss ‘where the magic started’ in HBO Max special

The original cast of the Harry Potter series will be reunited 20 years after the first film was released.

An HBO Max special titled Return to Hogwarts will be released on 1 January 2022, the network has said.

Continue reading...

The Six review – the Chinese survivors who were written out of the Titanic narrative

Posted on by

Arthur Jones’s film seeks the stories of six Chinese men who survived the 1912 tragedy and finds undisguised western racism

What’s in a name? That evergreen question is complicated even further in Arthur Jones’s fascinating documentary, executive produced by James Cameron and informed by the research of marine historian Steven Schwankert. Following the Titanic sinking in 1912, the identities of the 700-odd survivors have been mostly claimed, except for those of six Chinese men – out of eight who boarded – who remained bizarrely neglected. This film chronicles Schwankert’s quest to unravel the mystery, as his arduous journey across the US, the UK, Canada, and China takes the shape of a detective story, where each revelation exposes the blatant racism of early 20th-century western politics.

Armed with a dock slip listing the names of the Titanic’s eight Chinese passengers, Schwankert and peers’ attempt to trace their origins runs into immediate difficulties, as most of their subjects changed their identities in order to sidestep cruel and discriminatory immigration regulations. These Titanic survivors arrived in the US looking to work as labourers, and under the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act they were shipped to other countries immediately after the sinking. Some disappeared without a trace. The only survivor whom the researchers were able to build a coherent narrative around was Fang Lang, who founded a business in the US by changing his name and working as a merchant, shielding himself from the Exclusion Act, which targeted manual labourers.

Continue reading...

Singular vision: New film spotlights queer New Zealand photographer who broke the mould

Posted on by

When she started out 50 years ago, Fiona Clark’s work was met with rejection. Now she’s the subject of an admiring documentary

Whether documenting the crackling raw energy of Auckland’s fledgling punk rock scene in the 1970s or the hedonistic glamour of Karangahape Road’s queer culture, renowned New Zealand photographer Fiona Clark’s vibrant photos evocatively capture people and personalities in subcultures many people wouldn’t even know existed.

Seen as too confronting and radical by the New Zealand art world in the 1970s, Clark’s work was met with resistance from major art dealers who told her “we’re not handling your work”, and some of her images mysteriously disappeared from the Auckland art gallery. But Clark has never let this distract her from her singular vision.

Continue reading...

‘A mirror of now’: the Valencian Nazis who inspired Óscar Aibar’s new film

Posted on by

El sustituto based on ‘Germans from Dénia’ who sought refuge in Spain after the second world war

Óscar Aibar’s latest film, a thriller anchored in grotesque historical fact, owes its existence to a random holiday meal a decade or so ago.

The Spanish director was in Valencia for the summer when he looked up from his plate to study the pictures of famous people on the restaurant walls.

Continue reading...

Will Smith: now Hollywood royalty, the star’s rise has been far from painless

Posted on by

From Fresh Prince to King Richard, personal upsets have so far failed to derail his childhood goal to be the world’s biggest film star

There’s a seemingly offhand quality which is central to the appeal of Will Smith: an innate magnetism and loose-limbed, casual coolness. But the career path from teenage rap artist to TV actor to superstar status was anything but effortless; it was the result of a self-described “psychotic” work ethic and meticulous, perhaps even obsessive, planning.

For a while, at least, he was one of the most bankable film actors on the planet – a planet that he saved on a regular basis in summer blockbusters. But while that kind of success rate is hard to sustain, Smith has shown himself to be extremely adaptable compared to his contemporaries. From film actor/musician, he has evolved into a multimedia phenomenon. He has adopted a very marketable openness and accessibility, and embraced personal failures as teachable moments.

Continue reading...

Inside the world of foley artists: ‘Watermelons are brilliant for the sound of brains hitting the floor’

Posted on by

They are film and television’s unsung heroes: the people who create sounds, for everything from crunchy snow, kissing and horses’ hooves. Just don’t mention coconuts

Monday morning in the small Essex town of Coggeshall, and in an unassuming building that used to be a laundry, a man named Barnaby is trying to sound like a horse. Trying and succeeding, uncannily. Not neighing or whinnying, just making the sound of the hooves on the ground.

In a big screen on the wall of a windowless room is an armoured knight astride a white warhorse. It’s Richard III, as it happens, accompanied by a gaggle of guards, also armoured and mounted. It’s a scene from The Lost King, Stephen Frears’s upcoming film about the woman who, after 30 years of looking, discovered Richard’s remains under a Leicester car park.

Continue reading...

Rocky IV: Rocky vs Drago review – silly director’s cut is a losing battle

Posted on by

Sylvester Stallone’s attempt to put a new sheen on his Cold War relic of a sequel is a ridiculous and largely pointless undertaking

There’s a tension in the Rocky series between two largely incompatible conceits: Rocky Balboa as the shy, humble, gentleman brawler from working-class Philly or Rocky Balboa as the cartoon avatar of America’s can-do spirit, intrepidly grinding through title matches against stronger, faster, more colorful opponents. The first type won a best picture Oscar for its young writer/star, Sylvester Stallone, who, in classic underdog fashion, was wildly overmatched against All the President’s Men, Bound for Glory, Network, and Taxi Driver. The second type dominated the next decade in ever-more garish and cynical vehicles, none dumber than Rocky IV, which pitted The Italian Stallion against Ivan Drago, a dead-eyed, machine-tooled robot of the Soviet empire.

Now that Creed and its sequel have brought the vintage Rocky back — and, in Creed II, the surprisingly affecting return of Dolph Lundgren as Drago — Stallone has retooled Rocky IV to seem more like the original Rocky, at least insofar as such a feat is possible. His new Rocky IV: Rocky Vs. Drago is only a few minutes longer than the original cut, but there’s a significant amount of tinkering in this version, particularly toward the beginning, that’s intended to add depth to Rocky’s relationships to his friend and rival Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) and his wife Adrian (Talia Shire), and remove some of the sillier touches, most notably the infamous robot given to his brother-in-law, Paulie (Burt Young), as a birthday gift.

Continue reading...

The Crown’s Josh O’Connor: ‘My advice to my 21-year-old self? Find a therapist’

Posted on by

Before his turn as a conflicted survivor of the first world war in Mothering Sunday, the star of God’s Own Country, The Durrells and The Crown answers your questions

If you weren’t an actor and you had to work in the film industry, what would you like to do? avishagfink

I would like to be a ceramicist. I still want to be a ceramicist while also being an actor. A functional ceramicist. My grandmother was a sculptural ceramicist and she was very brilliant, but I’d like to make plates and pots and mugs. I’m a big fan of Ian Godfrey and I’m very fortunate to have a couple of his pieces. Lucie Rie and Hans Coper I really like; Richard Batterham, very much.

Continue reading...

Peter Jackson sells special effects studio Weta Digital for $1.63bn

Posted on by

The Wellington-based studio built characters and scenes for films including Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Wonder Woman and Planet of the Apes

The special effects studio co-founded by Sir Peter Jackson, which has brought blockbusters including Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones to life, has been sold for more than $1.6bn, in the latest blow to New Zealand’s film and TV industry.

The cash and shares deal, which will see Weta Digital sold to US-based video game company Unity Software for $1.63bn, comes less than three months after Amazon made the shock decision to move its $1bn-plus development of a small screen adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) from New Zealand to the UK after shooting just one series.

Continue reading...

Volcano review – spoon-glueing Ukrainian adventure takes a surreal turn

Posted on by

Roman Bondarchuk handles this strange tale about an interpreter left stranded with some locals with deadpan poise

“That’s our wandering buoy. It slipped its anchor near the dam. It appears and disappears at will.” A light, unfathomable absurdity governs this 2018 fiction debut by Ukrainian documentarian Roman Bondarchuk, set in the area around the city of Kherson; a sun-roasted steppe north of the Crimea where Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) interpreter Lukas (Serhiy Stepansky) becomes stranded. He’s escorting an SUV full of foreign delegates when it breaks down and he wanders off in search of a mobile signal. On his return, both car and foreigners have vanished.

Hitching a ride, Lukas is invited to stay with Vova (Viktor Zhdanov), a middle-aged potterer living with his mother and daughter in a capacious ramshackle construction on the banks of the Dnieper river. So begins Lukas’s initiation – like a milder Ukrainian version of Wake in Fright – into the local anomie. Vova enjoys sticking spoons to his forehead using the supply of glue that was his severance payment from the Soviet fish farm he worked for; then Lukas gets an invite to a listless student party where someone nicks his jacket and wallet. Constantly slipping sly details into the frame, Bondarchuk handles the whole farrago with a lovely deadpan poise. Incensed by the theft, Lukas heads to the police station to make a complaint. Cut to him in the cells.

Continue reading...