Category Archives: Film

Dubai: A Riveting Mystery – Jessica Alba and Zac Efron’s new tourist ad continues a Captivating Saga

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Tired of Tinseltown, the pair have turned instead to shilling for the UAE. Oddly, their YouTube advertorial micro-features are actually really good

If you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed that neither Jessica Alba or Zac Efron are very good at hiding their disdain for Hollywood. It has been a decade since Alba has acted in anything approaching a high-profile role, preferring instead to concentrate on her consumer goods company. Efron, meanwhile, made a Netflix documentary last year in which he repeatedly slated Hollywood and its practices.

However, despite this they are both attractive, well-known actors. And this means, if they’re tired of Hollywood, plenty of other outlets are available to them. And by “plenty of other outlets”, I mean “the Dubai tourist board”’.

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Netflix employees join wave of tech activism with walkout over Chappelle controversy

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Slew of walkouts by tech workers, unthinkable mere years ago, shows workers ‘now understand their labor power’, expert says

Employees at Netflix halted work on Wednesday and staged a protest outside the company’s Los Gatos, California, headquarters to condemn the streaming platform’s handling of complaints against Dave Chappelle’s new special.

The actions – which hundreds participated in – are the latest in a string of highly visible organizing efforts in the tech sector, as workers increasingly take their grievances about company policies and decisions public.

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Dune review – Denis Villeneuve’s awe-inspiring epic is a moment of triumph

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Villeneuve’s take on the sci-fi classic starring Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac and Zendaya has been given room to breathe, creating a colossal spectacle

If there can ever be a moment of triumph for a director, when the anxiety of influence is vanquished – for a bit, anyway – then Denis Villeneuve might have achieved it. This eerily vast and awe-inspiring epic, a cathedral of interplanetary strangeness, is better than the attempt a generation ago by an acknowledged master.

David Lynch’s Dune from 1984 was an interesting, rackety, flawed movie that attempted to cram the entirety of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel into its running time – the result was like Flash Gordon without the laughs. Villeneuve, with his co-writers Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, has used less than half the book (with a second episode to come) and allowed it room to grow: to breathe and drift through unimaginably vast reaches of fictional galaxies, with images of architecturally enormous spacecraft moving into view, or delicately lowering themselves on to alien landscapes of parched and austere beauty, particularly the ravishingly pure desert landmass of “Dune”, the contested planet itself. Star Wars’ debt to Dune, and now Dune’s debt to Star Wars, has been extensively discussed (amusingly, Dune gives us moving holograms rather like the one in which Princess Leia first begged Obi-Wan Kenobi for help). But this blockpulverising film feels more like TE Lawrence’s imperious version of The Phantom Menace. This is how it ought to have been.

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After We Fell review – Harry Styles-inspired romance is stupendously wooden

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Fans of the YA After series should find something amid the tangled mess of plot, daytime-soap acting and inanimate passion – everyone else should look away

If you don’t identify as an Afternator or recognise the hashtag #Hessa, a short explanation is necessary. After is a clutch of bestselling YA romance novels once described as “Fifty Shades of Grey for teens”. US author Anna Todd started writing stories as fan fiction for the boyband One Direction and Harry Styles is the inspiration for broody-eyed bad-boy Hardin Scott; he’s the on-off boyfriend of bookish virginal college student Tessa Young. This film is the stupendously wooden and humourless third in the series. It’s heading straight to Amazon and should come with a warning to viewers: contains extremely boring sex.

If you’re new to the franchise, don’t even bother trying. The script works on the basis that everyone watching has read the books, seen the previous movies and bought the T-shirt (sloganned versions available on Etsy: “Mentally dating Hardin Scott”). No attempt whatsoever is made to introduce us to the tedious tangle of relationships. That said, all you need to know about Tessa and Hardin is that they can’t live without each other.

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West Side Story at 60: the dazzlingly modern musical that’ll be hard to beat

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With Steven Spielberg’s remake almost out, the 1961 original still feels thrillingly contemporary, a tough act to follow

It’s the opening credits that do it right away. Following three eerie whistles over a black screen, West Side Story explodes into a full screen of poster-paint colour – shifting from orange to red to magenta to royal blue – as Leonard Bernstein’s four-minute overture brassily clatters into action. Over the colour, a stark design flourish: seemingly random brigades of parallel vertical black lines, only coalescing at the overture’s end into the tip of Manhattan, viewed from the air, cuing a vertiginous bird’s-eye montage of New York City in motion. That chipper yet chillingly disembodied whistle returns; by the time we finally see a human face, six coolly riveting minutes has passed.

This whole title sequence – from the graphics to the aerial photography – was visualised by Saul Bass, the distinctive graphic designer then favoured by such aggressive stylists as Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. It still seems, perhaps even more than anything that follows in West Side Story, sleekly and breath-catchingly modern: a coup of expensive minimalism at the outset of a splashy Hollywood production. That was no accident: in 1961, United Artists set out for the film to be something bracing and new in the movie musical, an industry staple that was looking increasingly out of step with a youth culture turning toward rock’n’roll.

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The day I cooked timpano with Stanley Tucci

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The giant Italian pie was the centrepiece of the star’s Big Night film. Now he’s invited me round to his house to make it

• Now try cooking Tucci’s timpano yourself

Getting your homework marked by Stanley Tucci is terrifying. Not because he is scary. On the contrary. He has impeccable, courtly manners. It’s terrifying because of what is at stake. I prise off the lid to the plastic box and turn its contents towards him, shyly. Tucci plucks a single chilled meatball from the one kilo throng, each the size of a large marble, and pops it into his mouth. He nods slowly, then smiles. “Perfetto,” he says, simply. Thank Christ for that. The meatballs, made to his own detailed recipe, are a key part of a grandiose cooking adventure we are embarking upon today, here in his kitchen. They need to be right.

In 1996, Tucci introduced the world to one of his family’s great culinary traditions, courtesy of the movie Big Night, which he starred in, co-wrote and co-directed. In the film, set in 1950s America, Tucci plays a recent Italian immigrant who, along with his chef brother, runs a struggling Italian restaurant on the shore not far from New York City. To raise its profile, they decide to stage a special dinner which, they have been told, will be attended by the great American-Italian singing star Louis Prima. The centrepiece of this magnificent, delirious feast will be a timpano.

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Female directors wait longer than men for their big break, report reveals

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A huge equality gap in top jobs and pay has been highlighted between women TV documentary-makers and male colleagues

Television documentary teams in Britain today are full of ambitious and capable women but most of them have to wait much longer than their male colleagues to become directors and earn a bigger wage.

The findings of the campaigning group We Are Doc Women (WADW), released this weekend, have revealed that gender equality is still a goal, not a reality, in factual programme-making.

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Russian film crew return to Earth after shooting the first movie in space

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Actor and director land safely in Kazakhstan after spending 12 days on the International Space Station shooting the first movie in orbit

A Russian actor and a film director have returned to Earth after spending 12 days on the International Space Station shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit.

Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe early on Sunday, according to footage broadcast live by the Russian space agency.

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‘My life in the mafia’s shadow’: Italy’s most hunted author, Robert Saviano

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Since 2006, the acclaimed writer has lived in fear for his life, following publication of his exposé on the criminal gangs. The Observer takes a trip back to Naples with him and his minders

On a Friday in autumn 2006, local newspapers and prosecutors in Italy’s south-western region of Campania received the same anonymous letter. Computer-typed and delivered by hand in the early morning, it detailed the Neapolitan Mafia’s plan to execute a 26-year-old Italian writer. His name was Roberto Saviano and his book, Gomorrah, a devastating denunciation of the Camorra’s criminal activity, was on its way to becoming a bestseller.

The unpublished letter, seen by the Observer, refers to a meeting held in a betting office in Casal di Principe, Saviano’s hometown, in which local bosses, known as some of the most violent in the Camorra, decreed that Saviano must die, saying that his murder would take place “when the waters are calm”.

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‘The heaven of film-making’: how a Dalit orphan got to tell her own story

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A gift of a camera inspired Belmaya Nepali to rise above poverty and abuse to make documentaries

• I Am Belmaya review

Belmaya Nepali’s life changed for ever when, at 14, she was given a camera.

The British film-maker Sue Carpenter had come to Pokhara, a tourist city in central Nepal, to run a photography project with disadvantaged girls living in an institution. One of those girls was Belmaya.

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‘I wanted this film to be 100% Somali’: the fight to make The Gravedigger’s Wife

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Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, who directed the acclaimed drama, reveals the struggle to portray his community ‘with dignity and compassion’

“I am Somali and I made this film for Somali people to watch a film in their mother tongue without needing subtitles,” says film director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed. Ahmed made his feature debut with The Gravedigger’s Wife, and after premiering in May at the Cannes film festival’s Critics’ Week, it made headlines as the first film from Somalia to be put forward for the Oscars.

“As a film-maker, I felt a sense of responsibility to tell the story of how I view my Somali community and to tell this story with dignity, tenderness and compassion – all the qualities I’ve been raised with,” says Ahmed, who was born in Somalia before moving to Finland as a teenager.

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‘It’s still really, really raw’: Port Arthur massacre film Nitram premieres in Hobart to half-empty cinema

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The controversial film’s first Tasmanian screening was described as ‘like going to a funeral’. How will it be received in a town that won’t speak the killer’s name?

There were no posters advertising the Tasmanian premiere of Nitram at the independent State Cinema, which took place on Thursday night.

Justin Kurzel’s new film dramatising the lead-up to 1996’s Port Arthur massacre, opened to a quiet, small crowd in the mass shooter’s home town of Hobart. Its trailers were not included in any other scheduling, and the film’s opening lagged two weeks behind its national release.

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Netflix and Unesco search for African film-makers to ‘reimagine’ folktales

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Competition opens to find six young creators in sub-Saharan Africa who will be funded to produce movies for 2022

For Nelson Mandela they were “morsels rich with the gritty essence of Africa but in many instances universal in their portrayal of humanity, beasts and the mystical.”

Passed down through the generations, whispered at bedtimes and raucously retold by elders, folktales have long been a mainstay of African cultural heritage.

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Azor review – eerie conspiracy thriller about the complacency of the super-rich

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Andreas Fontana’s debut feature is an unnervingly subtle drama about a Swiss private banker visiting clients in Argentina during the period of the military junta and ‘disappearances’

Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air. Andreas Fontana is a Swiss director making his feature debut with this conspiracy drama-thriller, shot with a kind of desiccated blankness, about the occult world of super-wealth and things not to be talked about. The title is a Swiss banker’s code-word in conversation for “Be silent”.

It is set in 1980 in Argentina, at the time of the junta’s dirty war against leftists and dissidents, and you could set it alongside recent movies including Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo (2018) and Francisco Márquez’s A Common Crime (2020), which intuited the almost supernatural fear among those left behind when people they knew had vanished and joined los desaparecidos, the disappeared ones. But Azor gives a queasy new perspective on the horror of those times, and there is even a nauseous echo of the Swiss banks’ attitude to their German neighbours in the second world war.

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Do we really need a new version of Home Alone?

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A new trailer has surfaced for Home Sweet Home Alone, which looks to be a sequel that’s also a carbon copy of an original that doesn’t need bettering

The trailer for the Disney+ movie Home Sweet Home Alone is really quite something. In it, a large and chaotic family tie themselves in knots ahead of a holiday to Tokyo only to discover that, in their haste, they have accidentally left one of their children behind. While they scramble to return to their home, the boy is left to fend for himself – a danger that is only compounded when two sly burglars pick his home to be robbed. What follows is an orgy of cartoonish violence as the abandoned boy jerry-rigs a selection of household items to cause maximum damage to the intruders. Brilliant.

Basically, then, Home Sweet Home Alone appears to exist in order to answer one simple question: what if Home Alone was, um, Home Alone?

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The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmāo review – sisters fight the pain of patriarchy

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This gorgeous and moving melodrama finds two women in 1950s Rio under suffocating family expectations – and sees what happens when they are defied

‘What do you want from life?” a husband drunkenly yells at his wife in Karim Aïnouz’s gorgeous and very moving melodrama set in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. The man’s wife is Euridice (Julia Stockler) and what she wants is to be a classical pianist. Her husband is angry and hurt: why can’t she just be happy in the kitchen? Adapted from a novel by Martha Batalha, this is the story of Euridice and her sister Guida (Carol Duarte): their inner conflicts and rebellion against the suffocating patriarchy of home.

The film beings a few years earlier: Euridice is 18 and applying to study music in Vienna. Her heart is broken when boy-mad Guida runs away with a no-good sailor to Greece, promising to write when she is married. Predictably, she returns with a baby bump and no wedding ring. There’s an appalling homecoming scene when their dad, a baker, violently shoves Guida out of the house; she’s nine months pregnant at the time (and the film never lets us forget that violence can be done to these women at any time of a man’s choosing). Unforgivably, Guida’s dad says that Euridice has left Rio and is living in Vienna. The truth is she’s up the road, married to an insightless oaf.

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Belfast review – Kenneth Branagh’s euphoric eulogy to his home city

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Nightmarishness meets nostalgia as Jamie Dornan and Judi Dench star in a scintillating Troubles-era coming-of-age tale

There is a terrific warmth and tenderness to Kenneth Branagh’s elegiac, autobiographical movie about the Belfast of his childhood: spryly written, beautifully acted and shot in a lustrous monochrome, with set pieces, madeleines and epiphanies that feel like a more emollient version of Terence Davies. Some may feel that the film is sentimental or that it does not sufficiently conform to the template of political anger and despair considered appropriate for dramas about Northern Ireland and the Troubles. And yes, there is certainly a spoonful of sugar (or two) in the mix, with some mandatory Van Morrison on the soundtrack. There’s a key climactic scene about how you disarm a gunman in the middle of a riot if you have no gun yourself, which has to be charitably indulged.

But this film has such emotional generosity and wit and it tackles a dilemma of the times not often understood: when, and if, to pack up and leave Belfast? Is it an understandable matter of survival or an abandonment of your beloved home town to the extremists? (Full disclosure: my own dad left Belfast for England, though well before the era of this film.)

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Brusque cops and femmes fatales: discovering Gilles Grangier’s forgotten noir gem

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Le Désordre et la Nuit, shown as part of a retrospective for the great thriller director at Lyon’s Lumière film festival, is a well-crafted treat for fans of the genre

A big feature, and an even bigger pleasure, of this year’s Lumière film festival in Lyon is the retrospective for the French master of policiers and crime, Gilles Grangier, a director who enjoyed great commercial success in movies and later in TV from the 1950s to the 80s, working with actors such as Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura and the great screenwriter Michel Audiard (father of Jacques). He was a working-class film-maker who came up from the streets of Paris, and started in the movies as a stuntman, grip, prop boy, any job he could get.

Grangier is a name perhaps eclipsed now by Jean-Pierre Melville and made to feel obsolete in the 60s by the New Wave as he was making the kind of well-crafted, unpretentious genre pictures that the new generation of revolutionaries affected to despise (while admiring the Hollywood equivalent). But his movies here have been a revelation – the late Bertrand Tavernier, the founder of this festival, was always a great ally of Grangier’s – particularly his amazingly dry, witty, briskly unsentimental lowlife crime melodrama Le Désordre et la Nuit from 1958. This thriller was adapted by Grangier and Audiard from a novel by the French wartime journalist Jacques Robert, celebrated for his 1945 reports from Berlin and being one of the few writers who saw the inside of Hitler’s bunker.

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Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka: is it so wrong to find him scrumdiddlyumptious?

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The actor’s in-costume Instagram post has caused social media users to accuse the film-makers of “making Willy Wonka sexy” – but Wonka-lust is hardly new

In a sentence I never thought I’d ever write, Timothée Chalamet has revealed his Wonka on Instagram. Chalamet is, of course, currently filming the Willy Wonka movie prequel, and his post last night gave the world its first look at this new iteration.

Judging by the internet, there are essentially two ways to react to it. The first is to be disgusted that Hollywood has bastardised one of the all-time great children’s characters by inventing a brand new backstory, with no input from its creator, for cash. The second is just to get really, really horny.

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Angeliena review – car park worker dreams of getaway in cartoonish South African drama

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Thin characterisation and a superficial critique of wealth inequality post-apartheid keep Uga Carlini’s fiction in first gear

The colourful opening of Uga Carlini’s Angeliena suggests a giddy ride awaits: the camera follows a suitcase plastered with travel stickers moving along a conveyor belt at an airport. But such vibrant detail only points up the film’s lack of emotional substance. A parking attendant for a posh hospital in South Africa, Angeliena (Euodia Samson) dreams of travelling the world, she adorns her little shack with tourist posters from faraway lands. At work, Angeliena brings a glow to the austere parking lot, pinning red roses that she grows herself to the windscreen wipers of fancy SUVs.

Such sweet-natured actions are presumably intended to endear Angeliena to us, yet reduce her to a unidimensional worker with a heart of gold. The thinness of the characterisation is made more pronounced by the cartoonishly evil Dr Mitchell (Colin Moss), the hospital owner and Angeliena’s antagonist, a spewer of Trumpian one-liners. Ludicrously, the film takes a tone-deaf turn when Angeliena is revealed to be suffering from an unnamed muscular atrophy that motivates her to finally embark on her world trip. Out of the blue, she develops facial tics. The only affecting sequences are the few-and-far-between gatherings between Angeliena and her eccentric female friends.

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