Category Archives: Film

Karen Gillan: ‘You should have seen my fight routines when I started – I looked like spaghetti’

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Her big break in Doctor Who led the Scottish actor to Hollywood. She talks her new film, Gunpowder Milkshake, the Jumanji hotpants furore – and why she worries she might be a bit, well, boring …

Karen Gillan’s house in the US is, she says, “like a little piece of Scotland in Los Angeles”. She is sipping coffee in her living room. The wallpaper behind her is a forest of brown, beige and mallards. When Vogue shot here last year, it described Gillan’s taste in interiors as “quirky”. “Yeah,” she sputters. “It’s all old trinkets.”

A piece of Scotland in Los Angeles is not a bad description of Gillan herself. Born in Inverness, she has lived in LA on and off for years. It’s a love-hate relationship. “I never feel settled here. It’s a real issue of mine.” Whenever she’s in LA, she gets the feeling that it’s not where she’s meant to be. Then she flies off and makes a film. “I come back and think …” – she does a cartoonish swooning sigh – “… It’s nice to be home. Then in a week I’m like: I’ve got to move.”

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‘Maybe the guy’s a masochist’: how Anthony Fauci became a superstar

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The US diseases expert has been spoofed by Brad Pitt and lauded as the ‘sexiest man alive’. Now the pop culture phenomenon is the focus of a documentary

Beer and bobbleheads. Candles, colouring books, cupcakes and cushions. Dolls, doughnuts, hoodies, mugs and socks. T-shirts and yard signs that declare “Dr Fauci is my hero” and “In Fauci we trust”.

Anthony Fauci, an 80-year-old scientist, doctor and public servant, has become an unlikely cult hero for millions of people during the Covid pandemic.

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The Lost Leonardo: has a new film solved the mystery of the world’s most expensive painting?

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Is the $450m Salvator Mundi a fake? This film – featuring tearful sycophants, sneering experts, dodgy dealers and a secretive superyacht – may finally settle the great da Vinci controversy

It is almost exactly 10 years since Salvator Mundi was unveiled, this “lost Leonardo” instantly triggering astonishment around the world. Since those giddy days, the work has had a turbulent time. As well as becoming the most expensive painting in history, going for $450m (£326m) at auction, Salvator Mundi was denounced by many as a fake and subsequently vanished from view. The painting is now the subject of The Lost Leonardo, a documentary by Andreas Koefoed that opens in cinemas this week.

“I would be surprised,” says Luke Syson, “if I went to see this documentary.” Syson is the curator who, back in 2011, first displayed The Saviour of the World, as its title translates, at the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci blockbuster. Syson is probably making a wise choice. He’s in the film and the way he clams up mid-interview makes him look like the archetypal embarrassed expert caught out on screen.

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The 30 best mobster movies – ranked!

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Ahead of the Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark hitting cinemas, here are 30 organised crime flicks you must see before you sleep with the fishes

Our criteria here is films featuring actual mobsters and the organised crime milieu – as opposed to hitmen, heists or bank robbers. Stefano Sollima’s punchy neo-noir, set in 2011, fits the bill with its imbroglio of crime families, political corruption and Rome real estate. Financed by Netflix, this is essentially a feature-length pilot for the addictive Suburra: Blood on Rome prequel series.

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‘I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase’ – how The Wire’s Omar changed TV

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He was the terrifying stick-up man who loved his gran, shopped in his pyjamas and tenderly kissed his boyfriend. We remember Omar’s great scenes – and pay tribute to Michael K Williams, the actor who brought him to life

Playing stick-up man Omar Little on The Wire, Michael K Williams was tough, frightening and brutal – his face scarred, his smile wide, toting a shotgun and wearing a long trenchcoat. So viewers of David Simon’s intricate TV portrait of Baltimore’s streets, docks, schools and politics felt the rug pulled from under them when they first saw him kiss his boyfriend in episode four of season one.

It was a moment that subverted audience expectations and signalled the complexity, ambition and depth that The Wire – which is often placed at or near the top of lists of the all-time greatest TV shows – was aiming to achieve. This is not a character you’ve seen before, the show seemed to be saying. These aren’t your usual stereotypes and cliches. A similar moment saw Idris Elba’s drug chief Stringer Bell attend a business studies class.

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‘Not always easy to comprehend’: Hollywood struggles with Belfast accent

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Reviewers in the US have lauded the film, but complain it is too difficult to understand and needs subtitles

Kenneth Branagh’s new autobiographical film, Belfast, is tipped for Oscar glory, but his home town will not be happy if it’s in the foreign language category.

Hollywood reviewers who have lauded the film’s storytelling and acting complain the Northern Ireland accents are difficult to understand and require subtitles.

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Wife of a Spy review – wartime mystery thriller of double and triple dealing

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Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s old-fashioned drama delivers big performances and intriguing plot twists

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has probably long since got used to seeing the words “no relation” after his name; and this Japanese film-maker has in any case established his own distinctive, valuable presence in Asian cinema. Just two years ago, he released his complex drama To the Ends of the Earth, and now, working with Ryû Hamaguchi as co-writer, he has created this excellent wartime mystery thriller, which won the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice film festival: an old-fashioned drama replete with big performances and plot twists, double-cross and triple-cross. It’s like a three-quarter scale version of a Lean epic, a mid-level Zhivago or English Patient, but all the more intriguing for being relatively modest in scope.

Yû Aoi is outstanding as Satoko, a movie actor in 1940 Kobe in Japan, married to Yûsaku (Issey Takahashi), a prosperous international trader whose liberal politics and contact with foreigners makes him frowned upon in increasingly nationalist Japan. Yûsaku is visited by his old schoolfriend Taiji (Masahiro Higashide), who is now in police uniform, and caught up in the new fascist enthusiasm. A gulf between the two is opening up, despite Taiji having not got over his erstwhile crush on Satoko. Something sinister is in the air, and when Yûsaku comes back from a business trip to Japanese-controlled Manchuria, he is stunned by evidence of war crimes carried out there by Japan’s Kwantung army. Disgusted by his country, he plans to pass on details to the international community and chiefly the Americans: Satoko realises that this makes her the wife of a spy and the question of her own personal and political loyalties, and her husband’s, are a tense enigma to the very end.

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‘What is this if not magic?’ The Italian man living as a hobbit

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After building his own version of Middle-earth, Nicolas Gentile has thrown a ‘ring’ into Mount Vesuvius

Nicolas Gentile, a 37-year-old Italian pastry chef, did not just want to pretend to be a hobbit – he wanted to live like one. First, he bought a piece of land in the countryside of Bucchianico, near the town of Chieti in Abruzzo, where he and his wife started building their personal Shire from JRR Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth.

Then, on 27 August, alongside a group of friends and Lord of the Rings fans dressed as an elf, a dwarf, a hobbit, a sorcerer and humans, he walked more than 120 miles (200km) from Chieti to Naples, crossing mountains and rivers, to throw the “One Ring”, a central plot element of The Lord of the Rings saga, into the volcano crater of Mount Vesuvius.

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Jean-Paul Belmondo: the beaten-up icon who made crime sexy

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Immortalised by Godard and Melville, the actor specialised in seductive tough guys – and blazed a trail through movie history

On the streets of Paris, car thief and fugitive cop killer Michel Poiccard has just been gunned down by the police, having shown an insolent, fatalistic attitude to the idea of getting caught, and indeed to the revelation that his American girlfriend Patricia, wannabe journalist and street vendor of the New York Herald Tribune, has ratted him out. She leans over Michel as he lies dying in a puddle of blood. Will Michel come up with some resonant last words? Not exactly. Defying agony from his bullet wounds, he just clownishly stretches his face into the two silly expressions he’d earlier used to explain the phrase “faire la tête”: a goofy silent scream, then a panto grin. Isn’t this what acting is, what life is: tragedy, comedy, faces, speeches? Who cares?

This unforgettably bizarre, throwaway gesture – the equal of “Here’s looking at you, kid” from Michel’s beloved Bogart – set the seal on Jean-Paul Belmondo’s sensational breakthrough in 1960 in Jean-Luc Godard’s equally legendary debut, À Bout de Souffle (AKA Breathless), from a treatment by François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, and co-starring Jean Seberg as the American mesmerised by his erotic, existential bravado.

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Islander review – change and contradictions on Robinson Crusoe island

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Stéphane Goël’s documentary merges the past and present of this small island off the coast of Chile

In an age of overconsumption and technological saturation, many yearn for an abstract “simpler” time in the past. Opening on a vessel bobbing on the ocean waves, Stéphane Goël’s Islander takes us on a journey that transcends both the past and the present, effectively dissecting and uncovering many contradictions and preoccupations dormant under this utopian ideal.

At the centre of the documentary is Robinson Crusoe island, west of Chile, and one of the inspirations for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel. Booming over the magnificent landscape of volcanic mountains is Mathieu Amalric’s evocative narration, as he takes on the role of Swiss aristocrat Alfred von Rodt who bought the island in 1877. Juxtaposed with these ghostly recollections are intimate interviews with Von Rodt’s descendants who are still living there. Also carefully observed are the inhabitants’ daily routines; at one point, a young boy is taught how to shoot a rabbit.

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From Mansfield Park to Mojo: why Harold Pinter’s acting deserves to be celebrated

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With the Pinter-penned 1963 classic The Servant back in cinemas, there’s a chance to reflect on the playwright’s less-acknowledged acting performances

Like an unhurried but dependable butler, The Servant is here again. It was only nine years ago that Joseph Losey’s crackling psychological drama, about the shifting power games between a toff (James Fox) and his manservant (Dirk Bogarde), was last doing the rounds in cinemas. But this is not a film that ever gets old.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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‘Images were suddenly powerless’: how the arts responded to 9/11

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On the 20th anniversary of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers, we consider how artists, writers, film-makers and comedians have attempted to grasp that momentous day and it’s legacy

As the world clustered, transfixed, around television screens, watching and rewatching footage of a plane gliding into the top of New York’s twin towers and a tiny, anonymous man plummeting to earth, another scene was unfolding on the ground, as panic-stricken families stumbled through the smoke and rubble to gather up their children from schools and kindergartens.

Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly stood four blocks away with their daughter, watching the second tower fall “in excruciatingly slow motion”. As art director of the New Yorker magazine, Mouly knew that she would have to come up with a rapid response. “I felt that images were suddenly powerless to help us understand what had happened. The only appropriate solution seemed to be to publish no cover image at all – an all-black cover. Then Art suggested adding the outlines of the two towers, black on black. So from no cover came a perfect image, which conveyed something about the unbearable loss of life, the sudden absence in our skyline, the abrupt tear in the fabric of reality,” she later recalled.

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Last Night in Soho review – a gaudy romp that’s stupidly enjoyable

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Edgar Wright’s time-travel film plays like a 60s pop song building towards a big climax

The nostalgia gauge is code-red on Last Night in Soho, a gaudy time-travel romp that whisks its modern-day heroine to a bygone London that probably never existed outside our fevered cultural imagination. It’s the era of Dusty Springfield and Biba; great music, cool threads. British writer-director Edgar Wright takes a grab-bag of 1960s ingredients, paints them up and makes them dance to his tune. His film is thoroughly silly and stupidly enjoyable. To misquote William Faulkner, the past isn’t dead, it’s propping up the bar at the Café de Paris.

“You like that retro style, huh?” a classmate remarks to Eloise Turner, a 21st-century design student – and you can bet your house she does. Eloise is up from deepest Cornwall to attend the London College of Fashion, still haunted by her mother’s suicide and struggling to find her feet in a city that’s not like the one she expected. Thomasin McKenzie plays her as your classic fairytale ingenue, guileless and wide-eyed, entirely out of her depth. She’s eyeing the future but her feet are stuck in the past.

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Angelina Jolie: ‘I just want my family to heal’

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The actor opens up about why her divorce from Brad Pitt is a human rights issue, escaping Harvey Weinstein and what young activists have taught her

• ‘People try to stop us speaking up’ – Jolie meets inspirational young campaigners

Angelina Jolie sits at a desk, back straight as a rule and rather regal. Her features are cartoonishly beautiful – straight black hair, vertiginous cheekbones, huge blue eyes and lips like a plumped red sofa. She is talking on Zoom to four young activists. It is a horribly apt day to be discussing human rights – the Taliban has just captured Ghazni city on its approach to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

If this were a movie, you might suspect Jolie was playing a divine leader addressing the fortunate few. Yet it soon becomes apparent that things aren’t quite as they seem. The actor and film director is the one in awe, not the activists. The young people talk about the work they have done raising awareness of the carnage in Syria, the environmental crisis, trans rights and food poverty. Jolie hangs on their every word. She tells them they have inspired her children who follow their work, warns them against burnout, apologises for the failings of her generation and says how honoured she is to meet them.

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‘People try to stop us speaking up’: Angelina Jolie’s lessons from young activists

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The actor’s latest project is a book to teach teenagers their rights. Here, she sits down with four young people to hear what they’re fighting for

• Read an interview with Jolie here

Angelina Jolie How do you feel the older generation are handling things?

Christina Adane, 17, a British anti-poverty campaigner, originally from Ethiopia If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have said they had failed us and left us with a bunch of problems. I still feel that way at times, but I think cross-generational communication is crucial when fighting issues like racial and climate justice. It’s easy to fall into the mentality of us v them, youth v old people in power. But loads of older people want to help us. So it’s about connecting with decision-makers and ensuring they are listening, so they can represent us where we are not represented – in government, at meetings at the top of companies. We need to work with the older generation.

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Venice film festival 2021 week one roundup – serious firepower

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With big-hitters from returning heroes Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar and Paolo Sorrentino, plus an electrifying return from maverick Paul Schrader, it’s a heck of a starting bill at the Lido

This time last year, the film world raised a collective glass of prosecco to Venice. It was the first film festival to happen during that brief, sweet interlude between European lockdowns, and the organisation pulled off the Covid protocols magnificently – spaced seating, strict mask wearing, online ticketing. All that is still in place, and the gardens of the Casino compound remain a leafy oasis of calm.

But this year things aren’t quite so simple. For a start there are many more people attending, and the booking system has been unpredictable. Tickets for each screening become available exactly 74 hours in advance, some selling out within minutes, which means people are waking to book tickets at 6.30am, then spending the day anxiously trying to think ahead in three-day cycles. Add to this frustratingly long queues to get into the Casino area via temperature checks and bag checks, and only two days in – at time of writing – nerves are beginning to fray.

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Angelina Jolie feared for her children’s safety during marriage to Brad Pitt

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Actor and activist says her experiences made her realise importance of children’s rights

Angelina Jolie has told the Guardian she feared for the safety of her children during her marriage to Brad Pitt and criticised the US government for not doing more to protect the rights of minors.

In an interview with Weekend magazine, the actor and activist said her experiences in her relationship with Pitt made her realise the importance of children’s rights, which she is supporting with a new book, Know Your Rights.

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Dune review – blockbuster cinema at its dizzying, dazzling best

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Denis Villeneuve’s slow-burn space opera fuses the arthouse and the multiplex to create an epic of otherworldly brilliance

Dune reminds us what a Hollywood blockbuster can be. Implicitly, its message written again and again in the sand, Denis Villeneuve’s fantasy epic tells us that big-budget spectaculars don’t have to be dumb or hyperactive, that it’s possible to allow the odd quiet passage amid the explosions. Adapted from Frank Herbert’s 60s opus, Dune is dense, moody and quite often sublime – the missing link bridging the multiplex and the arthouse. Encountering it here was like stumbling across some fabulous lost tribe, or a breakaway branch of America’s founding fathers who laid out the template for a different and better New World.

Related: Spencer review – Princess Diana’s disastrous marriage makes a magnificent farce

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Spencer review – Princess Diana’s disastrous marriage makes a magnificent farce

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Kristen Stewart’s entirely compelling Di has no escape from the dress-up game of monarchy in Pablo Larraín’s unreverential movie

Sandringham, Christmas 1991. Bare trees, frosted fields, dead pheasants on the drive. Inside the grand house the dining table has been laid in readiness, but one of the principal guests – arguably the main course – is running late and lost. She grinds her car to a halt, tosses her perfect hair in frustration. “Where the fuck am I?” asks Diana, Princess of Wales.

And so begins this extraordinary film, which bills itself as “a fable from a true tragedy” and spotlights three days in the dissolution of Charles and Di’s marriage. Working off a sharp script by Steven Knight, Chilean director Pablo Larraín spins the headlines and scandals into a full-blown Gothic nightmare, an opulent ice palace of a movie with shades of Rebecca at the edges and a pleasing bat-squeak of absurdity in its portrayal of the royals. Larraín’s approach to the material is rich and intoxicating and altogether magnificent. I won’t call it majestic. That would do this implicitly republican film a disservice.

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Climate science teaches us to love insects. Horror films tell us to hate them. Who will win?

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Creepy-crawlies usually signify death, decay and evil in films – there’s a vast canon going back decades. But has the ‘When Insects Attack’ sub-genre had its day?


In Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles, a pair of chuckleheads called Manu and Jean-Gab (think Dumb and Dumber, but French) steal a Mercedes and find, in the boot, a housefly the size of a pitbull. They name it Dominique and train it to rob banks. At no point do they find it scary, even after it eats a dog. It’s so endearing, you will share their feelings.

This is a turn up for the books, since flies in cinema are more usually signifiers of death, decay and evil. Sometimes, as when Annie Graham goes up to the attic in Hereditary, their presence presages the discovery of a cadaver. They buzz symbolically around the grubby cheesecloth-wrapped bundle in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, while Father Delaney’s attempts to bless the cursed house in The Amityville Horror are thwarted by demonic bluebottles. In Phenomena, Jennifer Connelly plays a schoolgirl insect-whisperer who can summon flies for protection, but that doesn’t save her from getting submerged up to her neck in maggots. In the bonkers Indian action-fantasy Eega, a man murdered by his love rival is reincarnated as a vengeful housefly, but fusing your molecules with those of a Musca domestica is more likely to end in loss of vital anatomical parts, as happens in both the 1958 and 1986 versions of The Fly. (Help meeee!)

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