Category Archives: Film

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The unpublished letter, seen by the Observer, refers to a meeting held in a betting office in Casal di Principe, Saviano’s hometown, in which local bosses, known as some of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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Andrew Lloyd Webber says he hated the film Cats so much he bought a dog

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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.

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Barbara Hershey on Beaches, Woody Allen and breastfeeding on TV: ‘I was an innocent’

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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.

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The top 20 duels in cinema – ranked!

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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.

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Courage in a crisis: how everyday citizens coped with Covid across the world

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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.

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The Maid review – a giddy, gory satire that sticks it to the super-wealthy

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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.

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Shooting stars: Russians beating US in race for first film shot in space

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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.

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