Category Archives: Film

Josh Brolin on Donald Trump: ‘There’s no greater genius than him in marketing’

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The actor met the future president while making Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and says he is ‘not scared’ of him

Actor Josh Brolin says President Trump was a “different guy” when he first met him in 2009, and that “there is no greater genius than [Trump] in marketing”.

Brolin was speaking to the Independent to promote his new film Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery and said that while his clergyman character was not based on the president, there was a similarity in that once he “garners a sense of power, then there are no boundaries”.

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Dharmendra, Bollywood’s ‘He Man’ and one of its most enduring stars, dies at 89

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India’s prime minister among those paying tribute to celebrated actor whose career spanned six decades

Dharmendra, one of the most enduring stars of India’s Bollywood cinema, has died at the age of 89.

Born Dharam Singh Deol, but later known as Dharmendra, he rose to fame in the 1960s and became one of the most celebrated and popular stars of Indian cinema in a career that spanned six decades.

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Udo Kier, German actor who starred in 200 films spanning Lars von Trier to Ace Ventura, dies aged 81

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Actor who appeared in My Own Private Idaho, Blade, Armageddon and Dogville, as well as Madonna music videos and video games, died on Sunday

Udo Kier, the German actor who appeared in 275 roles across Hollywood and European cinema, including multiple films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Gus Van Sant and Lars von Trier, has died aged 81.

Kier died on Sunday morning, his partner Delbert McBride told Variety. The actor died in hospital in Palm Springs, California, his friend the photographer Michael Childers announced on social media. No cause of death was given.

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Theresa May and Cate Blanchett to guest edit BBC Today programme

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Former PM to examine issue of trust in politics and Oscar-winning actor’s show will discuss AI

The former prime minister Theresa May is to guest edit Radio 4’s Today programme and use it to explore the issue of dwindling trust in politics.

May, who resigned in 2019 with a tearful statement about the honour she felt in holding the office, will edit Today on New Year’s Eve.

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Michael Jackson is moonwalking back, but after the Springsteen flop is the pop biopic still relevant?

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Jackson’s songs are back on charts and biopic trailer racked up 116m views in 24 hours, yet there is a certain hesitation

Michael Jackson’s voodoo classic Thriller was high on Billboard’s Hot 100 in the week of 15 November, handing the 16-years-gone King of Pop a record for having a Top 10 hit across six different decades. Simultaneously, Jackson also broke records for receiving 116m views in 24 hours for the trailer of a new biopic, Michael, set for release in April.

Millions of fans may be excited and primed for a Jackson biopic. For comparison, the trailer beat out Taylor Swift’s Eras tour preview and it will join a procession of recent music biopics about Bruce Springsteen, Amy Winehouse, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Elton John. The most successful of all – the Freddie Mercury and Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody – took in nearly a billion dollars at the box office.

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Man who grabbed Ariana Grande at Wicked sequel premiere charged

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Footage shows the man jumping the red carpet barricade of the Singapore premiere of Wicked: For Good, then rushing towards and embracing the star

A court in Singapore has charged a man who grabbed Ariana Grande at a premiere of Wicked: For Good on Thursday night with being a public nuisance.

Video footage shows Johnson Wen jumping over a barricade at Universal Studios Singapore and rushing at Grande on the red carpet. Grande’s co-star Cynthia Erivo immediately jumped in to help protect her and Wen was moved away.

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Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine sign voice deal with AI company

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The voices of the Oscar-winning actors can now be used to create AI-generated versions in a new deal with ElevenLabs

Oscar-winning actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have both signed a deal with the AI audio company ElevenLabs.

The New York-based company can now create AI-generated versions of their voices as part of a bid to solve a “key ethical challenge” in the artificial intelligence industry’s alliance with Hollywood.

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Bad Bridgets podcast about crime among Irish women in US inspires film

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Margot Robbie’s company to make movie based on Northern Ireland academics’ stories of poverty and prison

It started as a trawl of dusty archives for an academic project about female Irish emigrants in Canada and the US by two history professors, a worthy but perhaps niche topic for research.

The subjects, after all, were human flotsam from Ireland’s diaspora whose existence was often barely recorded, let alone remembered.

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Lee Tamahori, director of Once Were Warriors and James Bond movie Die Another Day, dies aged 75

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New Zealand film-maker became a Hollywood fixture in the 90s and 00s, including making Pierce Brosnan’s last 007 movie, before returning to his home country

Lee Tamahori, the New Zealand director of Once Were Warriors and Die Another Day, has died aged 75.

In a statement to Radio New Zealand, Tamahori’s family said he had Parkinson’s and died “peacefully at home”.

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Film festival in New York cancelled after China puts pressure on directors

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Participants ask for their films not to be shown at IndieChina event, which was due to launch this weekend

An independent film festival due to start in New York this weekend has been cancelled after several film-makers pulled out due to harassment from the Chinese authorities, raising concerns about transnational repression.

The inaugural IndieChina film festival was planned to take place between 8 and 15 November. But on 5 November the festival’s curator, Zhu Rikun, posted on Facebook that he had been forced to cancel 80% of the planned screenings because film-makers had pulled out.

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Shirley Valentine actor Pauline Collins dies aged 85

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Family pays tribute to actor who was a ‘bright, sparky, witty presence on stage and screen’

The Shirley Valentine actor Pauline Collins has died aged 85, her family has announced.

She died peacefully, surrounded by her family, in her care home in Highgate, north London, having had Parkinson’s disease for several years, they said.

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Jennifer Lawrence says speaking about Trump would ‘add fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart’

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Actor who said in 2015 that a Trump presidency would be ‘the end of the world’ says celebrities make no difference to how people vote

Jennifer Lawrence has said she no longer feels it appropriate to speak out against the Trump administration, lest she exacerbate unhelpful debate and further divisions.

“I don’t really know if I should,” said Lawrence in an interview with the New York Times. “During the first Trump administration, I felt like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But as we’ve learned, election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for.

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Horror show: North American box office records lowest monthly total since 1997

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Halloween weekend failed to make numbers jump, adding up to the weakest monthly performance – other than during the pandemic – for three decades

Box office earnings in October have crashed to levels not seen since the late 1990s, with Halloween weekend becoming the worst of the year so far.

According to a report in Variety, cinema takings for October in North America totalled $425m (£323m), the lowest figure since October 1997, when it was $385m – not counting October 2020, when North American cinemas only took $63m as moviegoing was severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

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My Father’s Shadow looms over competition at British independent film awards

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Akinola Davies Jr’s Nigeria-set drama has 12 nominations, including best film and besr director

Nigeria-set drama My Father’s Shadow is the leading contender at this year’s British independent film awards (Bifas), after it scooped 12 nominations, including best British independent film, best director for Akinola Davies Jr, and best screenplay for Davies’s brother Wale. The film came out ahead of Pillion, adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’s coming-of-age relationship story, which got 10 nominations, and biopic I Swear, which got nine.

My Father’s Shadow, which stars Sope Dirisu and is Davies’s debut feature as a director, premiered at the Cannes film festival to admiring reviews. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described it as “a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives”. The film is yet to be released in the UK, but has already come out in Nigeria.

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Veteran actor Tchéky Karyo, star of Nikita and The Missing, dies aged 72

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French-Turkish actor appeared in a string of high-profile films, as well as hit BBC series The Missing

Tchéky Karyo, who appeared in some of director Luc Besson’s biggest hits and a string of international films, died on Friday at the age of 72, his family have announced.

A statement from his wife and children sent to AFP said he had “succumbed to cancer”.

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Madrid regional government co-funding Woody Allen’s new film – but it must feature ‘Madrid’ in the title

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Regional authority is investing €1.5m in the project but has stipulations about featuring ‘identifiable locations’ on screen and the film premiering at an international film festival

The Madrid regional government is hoping to harness the power of film tourism by investing €1.5m (£1.3m) in a new Woody Allen movie that will be shot in and around the Spanish capital and which will be contractually obliged to feature the word “Madrid” in its title.

Regional authorities are confident the 89-year-old film-maker’s next project could do for Madrid what Roman Holiday did for Rome tourism in the early 1950s, and what Sex and the City and Emily in Paris have more recently done to increase visitor numbers to New York and the French capital.

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House of Dynamite writer ‘respectfully disagrees’ with Pentagon’s complaints about nuclear missile thriller

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Noah Oppenheim responded to complaints from the Pentagon over the accuracy of the film’s depiction of the US’s defence systems

Warning: contains a spoiler for the plot of House of Dynamite

Noah Oppenheim, the writer of Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear-missile thriller House of Dynamite has responded to complaints from the Pentagon over the accuracy of its depiction of the US’s defence systems, saying he “respectfully disagree[s]”.

In an internal memo dated 16 October obtained by Bloomberg, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said: “The fictional interceptors in the movie miss their target and we understand this is intended to be a compelling part of the drama intended for the entertainment of the audience,” but results from real-world testing “tell a vastly different story.”

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Björn Andrésen, Swedish actor who starred in Death in Venice, dies aged 70

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Actor who also starred in Midsommar and became a musician was nicknamed ‘the most beautiful boy in the world’ – a title he struggled with all his life

Björn Andrésen, the Swedish actor best known for his breakout role in the 1971 film Death in Venice, has died aged 70.

At 15, Andrésen was cast in Italian director Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s novella, in which he played Tadzio, a beautiful boy with whom an older man, played by Dirk Bogarde, becomes obsessed.

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Actor June Lockhart of Lost in Space and Lassie fame dies aged 100

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Lockhart started out on stage at age eight and appeared in scores of television series and feature films

June Lockhart, the popular actor known for her work in film and television, has passed away at the age of 100.

She died on Thursday night of natural causes, with daughter June Elizabeth and granddaughter Christianna by her side, according to People.

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Story of Indigenous activist’s murder takes top prize at London film festival

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Jury says documentary about killing of Argentinian campaigner Javier Chocobar brings ‘a measure of the justice’ denied by the courts

A documentary about the murder of the Indigenous activist Javier Chocobar has taken the top prize at the London film festival, with the jury calling it “a measure of the justice” that has long been denied by the courts.

The Argentine film-maker Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary, Landmarks, won the best film award in the festival’s official competition, it was announced on Sunday.

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