Category Archives: Film

Hating Peter Tatchell review – crusading activist’s greatest hits

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Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry and the former archbishop of Canterbury appear in a chummy documentary recounting the gay rights activist’s most outrageous stunts and impressive achievements

“My doctors have said very clearly: ‘No more head injuries.’” So says Peter Tatchell, one of the world’s most tenacious, divisive and necessary activists, as he prepares to fly to Moscow in 2018 to protest against state-sanctioned homophobia. The trip, which returns him to the city where he was beaten and arrested in 2007, forms one of the few present-tense sections of this greatest hits-style documentary. Tatchell has sustained numerous injuries from his lifetime of protest, though claims of memory loss are comically undermined during a kid-gloves interview with Ian McKellen. “Fifty two years of civil disobedience, Peter!” gasps the actor admiringly. “Fifty three now,” Tatchell replies, unable to resist the lure of being right.

As of this year, it’s 54. Tatchell was already an activist when he moved from Melbourne to London in 1971 at the age of 19. Among other achievements, he went on to stage the first gay rights protest in a communist country (East Germany, 1973), co-found the gay pressure group OutRage!, and attempt citizen’s arrests of Robert Mugabe (London, 1999 and Brussels, 2001). The former MP Chris Smith correctly identifies those run-ins with the Zimbabwean dictator as turning points which softened public hostility toward Tatchell.

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‘Tom Cruise was an intense kid’: How Francis Ford Coppola made The Outsiders

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‘I was famous for casting unknown actors. I had Nicolas Cage, Robert Downey Jr and Matt Dillon in a circle watching each other try for parts’

Francis Ford Coppola, director
After my 1982 film One from the Heart failed commercially, my production company American Zoetrope was bankrupt – it was a low period for me. But then I received a letter written by Jo Ellen Misakian, a junior school librarian from Fresno, California. It read: “We are all so impressed with the book, The Outsiders by SE Hinton, that a petition has been circulated asking that it be made into a movie. We have chosen you to send it to.” It contained about 15 pages of children’s signatures written in different-coloured pens. It was very moving.

I read Susan Hinton’s book, written when she was in her late teens, and was touched by the level of regard these poor “Greaser” kids had for each other, even though they didn’t have the advantages of their “Social” rivals. I’ve always believed that kids have many more feelings than we give them credit for, and I wanted to make the story. When I was about 17, I had been a drama counsellor at a summer camp, and the idea of being with half a dozen kids in the country and making a movie seemed like being a camp counsellor again. I’d forget my troubles and have some laughs.

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The real life Forrest Gump: why did Rob Pope run across the US five times?

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Forrest Gump’s wisdom has inspired many of us, but Rob Pope took that a step further, dressing as his hero for the run of his life. But why? And what did he learn?

On 15 September 2016, Rob Pope, a chipper veterinarian from Liverpool, sat down in the chair of Fluke’s Barbers in Mobile, Alabama, and readied himself for a haircut. “So what would you like?” the barber asked him. Pope held up a photo of Forrest Gump. It had taken years of planning for Pope to embark on this trip to America, to make it to this barber’s chair. He’d spent countless hours daydreaming about it, building the momentum to go. As his job became ever more miserable – he was working 13-hour days, five days a week – the urge to escape became insurmountable. He quit and, along with his partner and fellow vet, Nadine, headed west.

In many ways, the seed for this adventure was sown in 2002. That was the year Pope’s mum, Cathy, died after a cancer diagnosis. Cathy was a medical laboratory scientific officer and a single parent. She raised Pope with grit, determination and heartfelt support of his passion: running. He’d shown promise at the sport since his school days when he took part in the oft-dreaded cross-country and excelled at it. Cathy would take him to his races, which soon became marathons. Marathons after marathons. To Pope she was a best friend, a rock, an inspiration, a support-crew leader. Before she died she asked him to make a promise: “Do one thing in your life that makes a difference.” These words echoed in his mind as he sat in that Alabamabarbershop, awaiting his turn beneath the clippers.

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Mark Gatiss: ‘I’m currently very, very ashamed of being English’

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The former League of Gentlemen star on his love of low-budget British spinechillers, his loathing of Brexit and a slew of projects opening this winter

Mark Gatiss scans the breakfast menu at an east London restaurant with a famished eye. We’re at the hinge moment between the nightlife of an A-lister, who attended the James Bond premiere the previous evening, and the day job as an actor who, by his own account, could only land a role he had wanted all his life by writing the play himself. “It was a long evening,” he says of No Time to Die. He hadn’t had dinner and was trying to stave off the hunger pangs by sipping water, but not too much, because he couldn’t get out to the loo: “So I’m just really hungry.” He’s like a jovial Eeyore, painting himself into a lugubrious picture of the turnip fields of celebrity, before deciding, with a giggle, that a hearty breakfast of avocado on toast is exactly what’s needed to put everything to rights.

This is certainly no time to die of hunger for Gatiss, who has rocketed out of the pandemic as one of British showbusiness’s most sought-after all-rounders. He’s currently putting the finishing touches to his remake of the 1972 children’s film The Amazing Mr Blunden while rehearsing his new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. The latest in a series of half-hour ghost stories, The Mezzotint, is ready to roll into his now customary slot on the Christmas TV schedules. But it’s not all fear and Victorian clothing, he spent part of the lost year in the Outer Hebrides, playing a country doctor in a first world war romance, The Road Dance, and another part messing about in a pedalo on a boating lake with his old League of Gentlemen muckers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith for a new series of their TV comedy Inside No 9.

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‘My Elizabeth Barrett Browning film needs a woman’s touch – but where are all the female directors?’

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Screenwriter of biopic about the radical poet says the industry must do more to get women behind the camera lens

A new film about a 19th-century poet and early feminist is crying out to be filmed through a woman’s lens, but it is likely to be directed by a man because there is such a shortage of female directors, according to one of Britain’s leading screenwriters.

Paula Milne has written a feature film inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who campaigned against social injustice, including slavery and child labour, while living in fear of her own father. Milne believes that such a story, with its many contemporary parallels, should be filmed by a woman, because of the natural empathy that women have for one another, but that is unlikely to happen.

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Maya Hawke: ‘My parents didn’t want to have me do bit-parts in their movies’

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The Stranger Things star on viral fame, the challenges of dyslexia, and convincing her actor parents she wanted to follow in their footsteps

New York-born Maya Hawke, 23, began her career in modelling before making her screen debut as Jo March in the BBC’s 2017 adaptation of Little Women. She was Linda “Flowerchild” Kasabian in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and plays Robin in Netflix hit Stranger Things. Hawke now stars in Mainstream, directed and written by Gia Coppola. She lives in New York and is the daughter of actors Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke.

Your new film Mainstream is a satire on viral fame. Are people too reliant on their mobile phones nowadays?
I’m sure they are, but it would be hypocritical of me to be judgmental because I love my phone. I love that I can go for a walk, put on headphones, listen to Phoebe Bridgers, feel melancholy and cry. I love that I can take a bath, play an audiobook and learn about neuroscience while I wash my hair. For someone who travels all the time and hates being alone, that connectivity is awesome. I use my phone all the time but I’m sure it’s rotting my brain and separating me from real connections. For my generation it’s hard to know life without it and what we’re missing out on.

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Last Night in Soho review – a deliciously twisted journey back to London’s swinging past

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Slasher fantasy and ghostly magic collide in Edgar Wright’s heady thriller about a fashion student who is mysteriously transported into the life of a 60s nightclub singer

“It’s not what you imagine, London,” says Rita Tushingham in this deliciously twisted love letter to Britain’s cinematic pop-culture past. Director and co-writer Edgar Wright, whose CV runs from the rural action-comedy Hot Fuzz to the recent dramatic music doc The Sparks Brothers, has cheekily described Last Night in Soho as “Peeping Tom’s Midnight Garden”, a mashup of seedy Soho nostalgia and melancholy magic. Making superb use of its West End and Fitzrovia locations, and boasting a cast that includes Terence Stamp (cutting a silhouette that weirdly recalls William Hartnell’s Doctor Who) and Diana Rigg in her final role, it’s a head-spinning fable that twists from finger-snapping retro fun to giallo-esque slasher fantasy as it dances through streets paved not with gold but with glitter, grit and splashes of stabby gore.

Thomasin McKenzie, who dazzled in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, is Eloise Turner, a wide-eyed, 60s-obsessed fashion student with a “gift” that leaves her haunted by Don’t Look Now-style visions of her dead mother. Having earned a place at the London College of Fashion, “Ellie” finds herself in a top-floor bedsit from whence she is nightly transported back into the capital’s swinging past through the ghostly mirrored-life of wannabe singer Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). In her dreams, Ellie (who says the 60s “speak to me”) both watches and becomes Sandie, aiming for the stars but falling to the streets as the meat-hook realities of London life hit home. Is Sandie a figment of Ellie’s overheated imagination – a wish-fulfilment turned into a nightmare - or has she somehow made a genuine connection across generations?

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Succession’s Nicholas Braun: ‘I feel better being honest than hiding’

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He’s the reluctant sex symbol who is now partying with the Clintons. But actor Nicholas Braun is only just coming to terms with his life-changing role as Cousin Greg, TV’s favourite antihero in Succession. He reveals how he is learning to embrace his newfound fame

Nicholas Braun arrived on Long Island by train, and then he took a car to the compound. This was three years ago. Braun had been invited to a weekend-long party at a fancy home owned by friends of the American actor Jeremy Strong, who Braun knew from the set of the Emmy Award-winning television show Succession, in which they both star. At the compound he was patted down by members of the secret service, which startled him at first, and then delighted him. (He later referred to the agents as “my boys”.) As guests flashed around, Braun remembers thinking, “How is it I’ve ended up here, at a party in a locked-down compound that has a federal agency working the door?” And then the Clintons arrived.

By this point, Braun had filmed just one series of Succession, the HBO juggernaut, which revolves around and pillories the Roy family, a venomous media dynasty in the mould of the Murdochs. (Perhaps you’ve heard of it.) Braun plays Greg Hirsch, a distant cousin and Roy family satellite who, as the show progresses, finds himself increasingly surrounded by powerful and prestigious people and the mucky opulence in which they operate, and becomes both seduced and confused by his new surroundings, often to comic effect.

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Alec Baldwin breaks silence on Rust shooting: ‘She was my friend’

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Actor tells reporter ‘this is a one-in-a-trillion episode’, in first remarks since fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins on film set

In his first public comments since accidentally fatally shooting the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of a film, Rust, in New Mexico earlier this month, Alec Baldwin said on Saturday: “She was my friend.”

The actor spoke to BackGrid, a “global celebrity news agency”, in Vermont, where he was photographed having lunch with his wife.

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Timothée Chalamet: how the prince of indie grew into a multiplex star

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A role in the sci-fi epic Dune has transformed the young actor into a bona fide leading man – but not one from the old Hollywood mould

In September, the Met Gala in New York – Anna Wintour’s annual fusion of fundraising gala and celebrity parade – redesigned itself for generation Z. Instagram sponsored the event, Justin Bieber was its headline performer, and four young whippersnappers were enlisted as co-chairs: singer Billie Eilish, tennis player Naomi Osaka, poet Amanda Gorman and – the elder statesman of the quartet at 25 – Timothée Chalamet.

Chalamet turned up, typically tousle-haired and puppy-eyed, in an outfit of two halves. Up top, a cropped, snugly tailored satin tuxedo jacket by avant-garde designer Haider Ackermann, complete with cummerbund and blingy brooches. Below, a pair of baggy cream jogging bottoms, tucked into white socks and Converse trainers. Half princely film star, half kid at play: it’s a look that encapsulates the persona of the biggest, most hysterically obsessed-over teen idol to emerge from the movies since the heyday of Twilight.

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James Ivory: ‘I keep being asked, was it difficult, your life? My life, if anything, was too easy’

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At 93, the Merchant Ivory director – and oldest ever Oscar winner – reflects on enduring love, delighting in his sexuality and defying film-making expectations

James Ivory’s movies revel in the elegance of the swan and simultaneously show how frantically its feet are paddling beneath the water. In the films for which he is best known – 1985’s A Room With a View, 1987’s Maurice, 1992’s Howards End and 1993’s The Remains of the Day, a fraction of his output – we see the effort put into making those rooms look so beautiful; the human cost of controlling your emotions. Cecil (Daniel Day-Lewis) pretending to clean his spectacles after Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter) breaks their engagement in A Room With a View; Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) looking at Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson) as she takes the book out of his hand: Ivory knows that an ocean of emotions can be contained in the smallest gesture.

Ivory, 93, spends most of his time in his 6,000-sq ft home in the Hudson Valley, but when he’s in Manhattan, he stays in the Upper East Side apartment he’s had for the past half-century. He shared it with his partner, Ismail Merchant, who produced his movies, while Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who wrote most of them, lived downstairs. But Merchant died in 2005 and Jhabvala died in 2013, so now it is just Ivory on his own. When he welcomes me inside on an unseasonably warm October day, he is chipper and bright: “This weather is wonderful, it’s like Los Angeles,” he smiles. He is, as usual, very busy.

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Holy bikini-clad Batwoman! Archive saves Mexico’s scorned popular films

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Permanencia Voluntaria has rescued hundreds of films and is seeking to challenge attitudes towards its legacy

From demons, ghosts and vampires to Martians, mad scientists and spurned lovers, the heroes and heroines of 20th-century Mexican popular cinema faced more than their share of enemies.

Few foes, however, have proved quite as formidable as the combined adversaries of time, critical snottiness and oblivion – not to mention the odd earthquake.

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Mark Strong on acting, insecurity and life without a father: ‘I got angry as I got older. It took years to fix’

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After three decades on the stage and screen, the star is still worrying about where his next job will come from. Meanwhile, at home, he frets about letting down his family

Mark Strong has a good face for villainy – spare and inscrutable, with thin lips and “eyes like tunnels”, as Arthur Miller might have put it. On camera, he gives a sort of fractional disclosure, expressions altering in tiny increments, so that watching him perform is often an exercise in judging how much good can reasonably be seen in the bad. He specialises in antiheroes and authority figures, from gangsters (Kick-Ass, The Long Firm) to heads of intelligence (The Imitation Game, Body of Lies, Zero Dark Thirty). His latest incarnation – as a surgeon who operates in the criminal underground in the TV drama Temple, now in its second series – melds these roles as he crosses and recrosses the line between conscientious and cruel.

Although highly regarded for his work across stage, film and TV, Strong is not a big winner of awards (though he earned an Olivier for his outstanding portrayal of Eddie Carbone in Miller’s A View from the Bridge in 2015). He comes across as somehow outside the system. He is reputable rather than starry, plays parts rather than leads and has retained the air of a jobbing actor. Surely at 58, after 30 years of nearly constant work and more than 100 screen credits, with a voice so sonorous and distinctive it draws you to the depths, he deserves a bigger breakthrough. Is he frustrated by the lack of leading parts?

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Last Night in Soho review | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week

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Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith star in a horror-thriller that takes a trip to the sleazy heart of London’s past

A trip to the dark heart of London’s unswinging 60s is what’s on offer in this entertaining, if uneven, film from screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns and director Edgar Wright, serving up a gorgeous soundtrack and some marvellous re-creations of sleazy Soho and the West End. There’s a tremendous image of the marquee for the 1965 Thunderball premiere in Coventry Street, and a show-stopping crane shot of Soho Square, apparently filmed from where the 20th Century Fox sign is now no longer to be found atop that company’s former premises.

Last Night in Soho is a doppelganger horror-thriller about a wide-eyed fashion student called Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) who has brought her mum’s old Dansette record player and Cilla Black and Petula Clark LPs up to London from Cornwall on the train. Eloise has a fetish for the lost innocent glamour of the 60s but, moping all alone in her manky bedsit, finds herself stricken with neon phantasms. Like a ghost from the future, Eloise dreams her way through a portal in time back into 60s London clubland, where she witnesses Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a blonde singer – exactly the kind of retro showbiz princess Eloise moonily idolises – who is being forced by her slick-haired manager Jack (Matt Smith) into having sex for money with creepy old men. Gradually, Eloise feels her identity merging with Sandie’s. Is she having a breakdown, or is this nightmare really happening?

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Rust shooting: officials say single bullet likely caused injury and death after Alec Baldwin fired gun on set

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Officers say Alec Baldwin is ‘active part’ of investigation but have yet to determine if they’ll bring charges against the actor or others

Officials confirmed on Wednesday that live bullets, including the round it is believed killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza, were found on the set of the movie Rust last week after actor Alec Baldwin fired a gun during a rehearsal – but no decisions have been made yet about any criminal charges.

“We believe that we have, in our possession, the firearm that was fired by Mr Baldwin. This is the firearm we believe discharged the bullet,” said Santa Fe’s county sheriff, Adan Mendoza, said at a press conference on Wednesday.

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Rust film set shooting: prosecutor says criminal charges possible

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Santa Fe county district attorney tells New York Times weapon Alec Baldwin fired was ‘legit’ antique gun

Criminal charges have not been ruled out in the fatal accidental shooting by Alec Baldwin on the Rust film set, the local district attorney handling the case has said in an interview.

Speaking with the New York Times on Tuesday, the Santa Fe county district attorney, Mary Carmack-Altwies, also said it was incorrect to refer to the firearm used in the incident as a “prop gun”, as media reports have.

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Donnie Darko at 20: the soulful student favourite comes of age

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Richard Kelly’s unusual sci-fi drama made a star of Jake Gyllenhaal and introduced emo teens to a brave new world

Midway through Donnie Darko, a creative young English teacher played by Drew Barrymore repeats the old maxim – recycled over the years by linguists, scholars and writers including JRR Tolkien – that the simple, banal phrase “cellar door” is the most purely, pleasingly harmonious combination of words in the English language. There’s something to be said for that, but one wonders if writer-director Richard Kelly was offering a challenge to the claim by naming his protagonist Donnie Darko – an irresistible, perfectly ridiculous name for an ordinary suburban schoolboy that nonetheless encapsulates his fey, eccentric aura. His new girlfriend says the name aloud, lolling it like a mint in her mouth, before observing that it makes him sound like “some kind of superhero”. “What makes you think I’m not?” he replies, deadpan.

Well, what indeed. Kelly’s sci-fi-tinted tale of adolescent isolation came out six months before Spider-Man, the film that kick-started the now all-consuming superhero movie revival, and the two have more in common than you might initially assume: both are stories of an awkward teenage boy coming to terms with what appear to be otherworldly abilities, and assuming responsibility for the world around them. For plucky Peter Parker, that means standard-issue feats of derring-do and defeating evil; for downcast Donnie Darko, it means ending and altering the very timeline in which he exists, ultimately dying so that others may live. As superhero origin stories go, it doesn’t have much franchise potential: Donnie’s legend begins and ends in one fell swoop. But it has an eerie, enduring power: would that many comic-book heroes’ stories were so noble and haunting and finite.

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Halyna Hutchins mourned amid anger at Hollywood ‘cutting corners’ on sets

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Somber vigil charged with subdued rage over conditions that many lower-paid crew believe were linked to cinematographer’s death

A public vigil for the slain cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in Los Angeles on Sunday evening served both as an unofficial memorial event and an outlet for anger over working conditions in Hollywood that many lower-paid crew believe were linked to the 42-year old mother’s death.

Several hundred colleagues gathered outside the local union office for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) which represents workers on film and TV sets, who had been poised to go on strike to protest about pay, long hours and dangers on sets just days before Hutchins was fatally shot by Alec Baldwin on the New Mexico set of the desert western film Rust last week.

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Alec Baldwin was pointing gun at camera when it went off, director says

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Joel Souza says actor was practising a scene at time of accidental shooting of Halyna Hutchins

Alec Baldwin was practising a scene that involved him pointing a gun “towards the camera lens” when it accidentally went off, killing his director of photography, according to a written statement by the film’s director.

The director, Joel Souza, said he heard what “sounded like a whip and then a loud pop”. He said he saw the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins clutch her midriff and stumble backwards. Souza noticed that he himself was bleeding from the right shoulder.

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