Composer says one good thing that came out of the big screen version of his stage musical was ‘my little Havanese puppy’
Andrew Lloyd Webber has admitted he hated the 2019 film adaptation of his smash-hit musical Cats so much he bought a dog.
The composer has never shied away from expressing his distaste with Tom Hooper’s star-studded and much-maligned big screen version of the stage musical.
Continue reading...Now 73, the star of Hannah and Her Sisters shines in Jason Blum’s new horror. She talks about why audiences are hungry for mature movies, and her unhappiness at becoming an accidental poster girl for cosmetic surgery
In 1973, Barbara Hershey – then known as Barbara Seagull, for reasons we’ll get into shortly – went on the popular US talkshow The Dick Cavett Show and torpedoed her career. She was on alongside her then partner, the actor David Carradine, but when Hershey/Seagull walked out on stage, she could hear their eight-month-old baby crying off-camera. So she ran off and returned with the little boy, named Free. Unfortunately, Free continued to fret. So Hershey/Seagull breastfed her baby live on air. Cavett was stunned and so, clearly, were the producers, who cut to commercials.
“Did you breastfeed the baby earlier or was that my imagination?” Cavett asked when they returned, Free now fed. “I did it,” Hershey, then 25, replied, entirely unabashed.
Continue reading...Forty-four years after The Duellists, Ridley Scott draws swords again with his star-studded swashbuckler The Last Duel. But which one-on-one fight film is the champion? Let mortal combat begin …
Inspired by Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, Gregory Widen wrote a screenplay about immortals trying to hack each other’s heads off with big swords. Former Olympic fencer Bob Anderson choreographed the showdown between Christopher Lambert and evil Clancy Brown, who is clearly having too much fun to live. “There can be only one!” Followed by a zillion sequels and TV spin-offs.
Continue reading...In a new Netflix documentary, the stories of activists and volunteers who stepped up to help during an impossible time are celebrated
The film-makers behind Convergence: Courage in a Crisis set out to make a documentary on the pandemic, not politics. But separating the pandemic from politics can be as difficult as convincing your anti-vaxxer aunt to log off Facebook.
Director Orlando von Einsiedel, alongside an ensemble of co-directors spread across the globe, from the US to India, began collaborating on the kaleidoscopic film in early April last year. They were capturing the uncertainty and the chaos, the apocalyptic emptiness of lockdowns, and the people who stepped up to help their communities; not just medical staff in underfunded and overwhelmed healthcare systems in places like Lima and London, but also those who stepped up to alleviate their burden.
Continue reading...Shadowy figures lurk in Lee Thongkham’s stylised horror, which wrongfoots the audience with jump scares aplenty
Thai writer-director Lee Thongkham’s horror feature is a giddy, gory little treat. Unfortunately, it’s hard to explain exactly what’s so fab about it without spoilers, so just take our word for it as long as you have the stomach for lots of fake blood and jump scares. Suffice to say that Thongkham is nimble when it comes to wrongfooting the viewer, and there’s some pleasingly pointed satire here as well, sticking it to rich, snobby people who think domestic workers are as disposable as empty washing up bottles.
The maid of the title is Joy (bob-haired ingenue Ploy Sornarin), a country girl who gets hired to schlep tea trays up and down the stairs in service to super-wealthy Uma (actor-model-singer Savika Chaiyadej), a woman so ridiculously haughty she dresses like a gameshow hostess for breakfast and always uses a cigarette holder – presumably so the butts don’t touch her lips. Joy has worked out that she’s but the latest in a long line of maids who don’t last long in that household, but when she asks the other servants they get all squirrelly and tell her she’s not to ask any questions.
Continue reading...Actor and director on International Space Station push ahead of Hollywood project led by Tom Cruise
The list of “firsts” in orbit under the Soviet space programme is legendary: first satellite, first dog, first man, first woman.
Now another looms after Russia sent an actor and a director to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of plans to make the first film in orbit – and once again put one over on the Americans.
Continue reading...Audrey Hepburn’s star-making turn as Holly Golightly remains as luminous as ever in Blake Edwards’ sweetened yet still bittersweet adaptation of Truman Capote’s novel
Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a sacred film in my household growing up. My mother’s VHS tape, fuzzily recorded off TV, was plastered in “do not tape over” warning labels, a defence I might have to explain to someone born 10 years later than I was. The opening credits on this worn copy were briefly disrupted with footage from the 1988 Wimbledon men’s final – still overlaid, in an altogether lovely technological blip, with the wistful strains of Henry Mancini’s Moon River theme. The warning labels dated from shortly after this unfortunate, swiftly aborted overlap.
I thus grew up thinking of Breakfast at Tiffany’s as a film that belonged – via the tape, in a most literal and physical sense – specifically to one person. And then, by extension, to me, as a kind of inheritance. We watched it many times in my childhood, when I was rather too young to understand what exactly Manhattan socialite Holly Golightly did with her life – though, in my defence, the film rather sidesteps the issue too. No matter: it was probably one of my first encounters with pure movie star power, or at least one of the first times I recognised it as such. Audrey Hepburn, so perfectly doe-eyed and beehived and brightly funny and winsomely sad, seemed as much to me a force of magic as Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, even if the person she was playing made less sense to me. And not least of all – probably most of all, if I’m being honest – there was a cat. Cats were a cheap and easy way to my heart in a movie: the whiplash of panic and relief I felt over the rash disposal and cute retrieval of Holly’s ginger mog returns to me every time I watch it still.
Continue reading...Pair will spend 12 days on International Space Station in effort to beat US to making first film in space
A Russian actor and a director have blasted off to the International Space Station (ISS) in an attempt to beat the US to the filming of the first movie in orbit.
The Russian crew are set to beat a Hollywood project announced last year by Tom Cruise, Nasa, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Continue reading...UN study finds streaming services have increased demand for film productions from across the continent, but warns piracy and underinvestment hampering growth
Film industries in Africa could quadruple their revenue to $20bn (£15bn) and create an extra 20m jobs in creative industries, according to a UN report about cinema on the continent.
The booming film industry in Nigeria – Nollywood is the world’s second-largest film industry in terms of output – and Senegal were examples of African countries with defined business models and growing avenues for local film productions, which are increasingly sought after by television and streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+, said the report by the United Nation’s cultural body, Unesco.
Continue reading...This part fiction, part documentary film captures the spontaneity of young friends Leonel and Antuàn
Directed by Pablo Briones, Sean Clark, and Jace Freeman, here is a film that blurs the lines between fiction and documentary as it accentuates bittersweet childhood connections, full of teases, mischief and innocent tenderness. Following Leonel and Antuàn, a pair of friends who grew up in the small Cuban town of Pueblo Textil, this mesmerising promenade through abandoned landscapes doubles as a journey to the cusp of adulthood.
With a script based on the real-life relationship and conversations between the two friends, Baracoa has an authentic spontaneity of children’s interactions so rarely captured in fiction films that rely on precocious child actors. The camera quietly observes the pair’s wanderings through ruined and deserted compounds whose austerity is transformed by the boys’ imagination. At one point, Leonel and Antuàn pretend to drive as they sit atop a broken down, rusted car frame. The moment is poetic, yet also full of melancholy. Soon, they will not find such childish daydreams so entertaining.
Continue reading...The 40-year-old actor on living with Frodo, coping with fans and why he loves fatherhood
I grew up in a blue-collar, working-class family in Cedar Rapids in Iowa. My dad worked at the box factory, and my mum worked at the Quaker Oats factory. Eventually they pooled resources and built a deli called Souper, which sold soups, sandwiches and salads. There’s normally a moment of inspiration that inspires an actor’s origins. For me it was minestrone soup… Of course it wasn’t! I never had that moment.
When I was six a talent manager spotted me and asked me if wanted to become an actor. I was like, “Yeah, why not?” My mother took me and my brother, Zack, who is seven years older than me, to LA for six weeks to a talent-spotting event and I ended up getting a job on a Paula Abdul video. Things moved relatively fast in the grand scheme of things.
Continue reading...This filmed version of the Broadway show, with its accidental comedy and cringeworthy lines, is a guilty-pleasures singalong in waiting
And … so … it’s … springtime for glamour and victimhood, winter for Windsors and Charles. Netflix have now given us the filmed version of the entirely gobsmacking and jawdropping Broadway show Diana: The Musical, shot at the Longacre theatre on West 48th Street last summer with no audience while the show itself was on pause due to the Covid pandemic. And while you’re waiting for Pablo Larraín’s movie Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart as Diana, this will have to do. Although there is a danger it will cause you to hyperventilate.
Not since the Cats movie have I literally shouted from my seat: “What? What? WHAT?” Only by having Diana ride on stage on the back of a Jellicle cat could this be more bizarre. If it was deliberate satire it would be genius, but it’s not. It’s a saucer-eyed retelling of the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, with bobbing chorus lines of footmen and flunkies who with a costume change morph into step-in-time phalanxes of snarling tabloid hacks, while Diana solemnly warbles downstage about her loneliness and determination in a pool of follow spotlight.
Continue reading...With his final turn as James Bond in No Time to Die filling cinemas, the actor takes questions from readers and fellow actors about the role, from being smacked around his nether regions to getting over his fear of heights
Most movie stars look tiny up close. Action lads especially. You can’t stop thinking: Vin Diesel is dinky! Statham’s a titch! Am I actually taller than Fassbender?
Daniel Craig is different. He doesn’t loom, but he is bulky. Stonehenge legs, whacking hands, just right for killing a man or mending a washing machine.
Continue reading...Neighbours launched him, and since then the star of Memento and Zone 414 has seized his Hollywood roles with a unique intensity. He talks about death, drugs, being a dad and divorce
At the start of this century, Guy Pearce was sitting pretty. He had shaken off the frothy soap bubbles of Neighbours, where he was one of the show’s original batch of pin-ups, along with Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, and was proving himself a versatile film actor – first as a sharp-clawed drag artist in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, then as a clench-jawed cop in LA Confidential.
Awaiting release was the existential thriller Memento, directed by a promising up-and-comer named Christopher Nolan. First, though, he heard whispers that Kenneth Turan, the film critic of the LA Times, had been singing his praises in a review of the military courtroom drama Rules of Engagement.
Continue reading...‘Discriminatory’ banning of I Am Samuel, about a gay man’s struggles with his sexuality, criticised by activists and producers
Activists and film producers have criticised a decision by the Kenya Film Classification Board to ban a documentary that tells the story of a Kenyan man struggling with his sexuality.
They said banning the 52-minute film, I Am Samuel, amounted to “discrimination and persecution” of LGBTQ+ people.
Continue reading...The long-awaited 25th outing for Ian Fleming’s superspy is a weird and self-aware epic with audacious surprises up its sleeve
The standard bearer of British soft power is back, in a film yanked from cinemas back in the time of the toilet roll shortage, based on a literary character conceived when sugar and meat rationing was still in force, and now emerging in cinemas as Britons are fighting for petrol in the forecourts.
Bond, like Norma Desmond, is once again ready for his closeup – and Daniel Craig once again shows us his handsome-Shrek face and the lovable bat ears, flecked with the scars of yesterday’s punch-up, the lips as ever pursed in determination or disgust.
Continue reading...With a more normal awards season on the way, it’s time to sift through what’s been loved and hated and look forward to what performances could make an impact
As we all edge slowly closer to something vaguely sorta kinda resembling a loose idea of normality, so too does Hollywood, its relatively fixed annual schedule going from blurry to a bit less blurry. After an almost normal summer, the fall festivals followed and while they weren’t quite back up to snuff (some had a semi-virtual element, some big films were notably missing), there was a dramatic improvement from 2020 and, importantly, they were pulled off with very few infections.
Related: ‘We want people to freak out’: inside Hollywood’s Museum of Motion Pictures
Continue reading...In a new documentary, the underrated singer’s life of depression, addiction and poverty is told while her incredible talents are celebrated
The outlines of the life led by singer Karen Dalton tell a heartbreaking tale. It was one scarred by consistent poverty, intermittent homelessness, bouts of depression and escalating alcohol and drug addiction, culminating in her death from Aids at 55. Yet, to Robert Yapkowitz, who co-directed a new documentary with Richard Peete titled Karen Dalton: In My Own Time, “there’s an inspirational element to her story. Karen was an artist who didn’t compromise. She made music that she was proud of with the people she loved. And that was the focus of her life.”
Related: Beatles on the brink: the truth about the Fab Four’s final days
Continue reading...Actor helped deliver food to people onboard NGO vessel that was refused entry to Italian port by then minister
Richard Gere has agreed to testify against Italy’s far-right former interior minister Matteo Salvini, who is standing trial for refusing to let a Spanish migrant rescue ship dock in an Italian port in 2019.
Prosecutors in Sicily have accused Salvini of dereliction of duty and kidnapping for blocking the NGO vessel Open Arms from docking in August 2019 as part of his closed-ports policy. Onboard were 147 people rescued in the Mediterranean. During the standoff, as the ship was anchored off the island of Lampedusa, some people threw themselves overboard in desperation.
Continue reading...Confident microbudget feature zones in on one woman’s unhappiness, and how skydiving provides an unlikely but dramatic release
Deragh Campbell is an award-winning Canadian actor and film-maker whose recent movie MS Slavic 7 I have to confess to finding weirdly inert and indulgent. She has a starring role in this movie, which is a confident, intimate microbudget feature shot almost entirely in searching closeup, directed by Campbell’s longtime collaborator Kazik Radwanski. It is a more approachable piece of work and Campbell’s performance is unsettlingly real.
She plays Anne, an unhappy young woman with a job in a children’s daycare centre and an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, whose life is turned upside down when she tastes the ecstatic thrill of skydiving. Anne gets on pretty badly with her grumpy, humourless colleagues – who may nevertheless have a point about her unprofessional, casual and derisive attitude – and argues with her mother. She meets a nice guy called Matt (Matt Johnson) at a co-worker’s wedding, though she may well be about to alienate him too. But all this is against the background of skydiving, which she took part in as part of the bachelorette party: the bride and all the maids-of-honour did it once, but Anne wants this amazing and passionate experience again and again. Could it be a miraculous therapy for her? Or is skydiving simply enlarging and intensifying her already troublesome and anarchic personality?
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