Category Archives: Film

Where does the Oscar race stand after this year’s big festivals?

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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

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‘She went her own way’: the tragic and unusual life of folk singer Karen Dalton

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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

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Richard Gere may testify in Matteo Salvini trial over rescue ship standoff

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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.

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Anne at 13,000ft review – a woman uses skydiving as therapy

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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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Beatles on the brink: the truth about the Fab Four’s final days

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The director’s new documentary weaves together hours of unseen footage to dispel many myths about the band’s final months. John Harris, who was involved in the project, tells the inside story

On paper, the idea looked brilliant. In the opening weeks of January 1969, the Beatles were working up new songs for a televised concert, and being filmed as they did so. Where the event would take place was unclear – but as rehearsals at Twickenham film studios went on, one of their associates came up with the idea of travelling to Libya, where they would perform in the remains of a famous amphitheatre, part of an ancient Roman city called Sabratha. As the plan was discussed amid set designs and maps one Wednesday afternoon, a new element was added: why not invite a few hundred fans to join them on a specially chartered ocean liner?

Over the previous few days, John Lennon had been quiet and withdrawn, but now he seemed to be brimming with enthusiasm. The ship, he said, could be the setting for final dress rehearsals. He envisaged the group timing their set so they fell into a carefully picked musical moment just as the sun came up over the Mediterranean. If the four of them had been wondering how to present their performance, here was the most gloriously simple of answers: “God’s the gimmick,” he enthused.

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The Man Who Sold His Skin review – tattooed refugee story offers up art-world satire

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Serious themes are undercut by the flippant tone of this story about a Syrian refugee who becomes a conceptual art object

Here is a muddled caper of movie that doesn’t know what it wants to say; it doesn’t work as a satire of the international art market, nor as a commentary on the racism of white European culture. And its attitude to Syria is undermined by a silly and unconvincing ending that leaves a strange taste in the mouth. It is inspired by the Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye and his human artwork called Tim: in 2008, Delvoye tattooed an elaborate punk-crucifixion scene on the back of a Zurich tattoo parlour owner named Tim Steiner, who in return for a cash payment agreed to sit still with his tattooed back on show in galleries for a certain number of times a year and have his tattooed skin surgically removed and put on display after his death. And of course it is this macabre destiny that lends fascination to the ongoing live events.

This movie from writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania imagines a Syrian man, Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) in love with a well-born woman Abeer (Dea Liane). But when he is wrongfully arrested by the tyrannical Assad government, Abeer’s family pressures her into marrying a smooth diplomat, Ziad (Saad Lostan), who takes her to live with him in Brussels where he is an embassy attache. Sam Ali manages to escape from police custody (the least of the film’s implausibilities) and get over the border into Lebanon where, hungry and hard up, he gatecrashes art exhibitions and gobbles the free canapes. And this is where he is approached by a preeningly arrogant artist, Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw), who looks like Roger De Bris, the theatre director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers. If Sam will agree to the humiliation of having a massive “Schengen visa” tattooed on his back, then Jeffrey will be legally able to transport him to Brussels as a conceptual art object rather than a human being, as part of a show about the commodification of humanity, and Sam will be able to see Abeer.

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‘A culture wars lightning rod’: exit Craig, enter a panic over woke Bond

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No Time to Die brings a 007 era to a close amid fever-pitch speculation and changed sensibilities

“I always joke, how many Bond fans does it take to change a lightbulb?” said Ajay Chowdhury, spokesperson for the James Bond international fan club, the oldest established 007 fan organisation in the world. “One. But 10 to complain how much better the original was.”

As Daniel Craig’s incarnation of Bond draws to a close with the release of No Time to Die next week, rumours over who will replace him have reached fever pitch.

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Ray Liotta: ‘Why haven’t I worked with Scorsese since Goodfellas? You’d have to ask him. I’d love to’

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After years of avoiding crime films, he’s back as a mafioso in the Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark. He talks about being adopted and getting into acting – and saves a surprise for the end


I am a little trepidatious ahead of my interview with Ray Liotta because the reviews, shall we say, are mixed. Not about his acting, which has been accoladed and adored from his first major film role, as Melanie Griffith’s crazy ex in 1986’s Something Wild, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. No, the problematic reviews are about Liotta personally. One person who worked with him described him to me as “the rudest arsehole I ever met”; another said he’s “a bit of a wildcard”, and I suspect that the latter is a euphemism for the former.

This would explain a long-running movie mystery: why isn’t he more successful?’ It took Liotta, now 66, until he was 30 to bag Something Wild, but after that, movie stardom seemed assured. He went from there to starring opposite Tom Hulce in the little-remembered Dominick and Eugene, and then playing “Shoeless” Joe Jackson in the extremely well-remembered Field of Dreams.

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Roger Michell: a quiet genius still hitting his stride | Peter Bradshaw

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The director’s death aged 65 is a huge blow for British cinema, whose very best qualities – of wit, intelligence and subtlety – Michell exemplified

Roger Michell was the TV and movie director who had a midas touch with actors and with a particular type of English material: witty, literate, poignant and romantic. Michell was a master at directing anything on the continuum between Jane Austen and Richard Curtis, and knew what animated both.

Related: Roger Michell – a career in pictures

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James Bond was ‘basically’ a rapist in early films, says No Time to Die director

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Cary Fukunaga cites scene from Thunderball that ‘wouldn’t fly today’ as new film aims to redress franchise’s gender politics

The director of No Time to Die, the 25th James Bond film, has said that Sean Connery’s version of the character was “basically” a rapist.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, Cary Fukunaga appeared to refer to a scene in 1965’s Thunderball in which Connery’s Bond forcibly kisses a nurse (played by Molly Peters) who has spurned his advances. In a later scene, Bond suggests he will keep quiet about information that could cost her her job if she sleeps with him. “I suppose my silence could have a price,” he says.

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On thin ice: how The Alpinist captured the terrifying climbs of Marc-André Leclerc

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Climbing solo without ropes, the Canadian adventurer would scale stratospheric walls of ice that could crack and fall with one wrong move. We meet the makers of a gripping, heartbreaking new film

An insect-like creature is climbing a wall. The wall is made of ice – not regular, firm ice, but ice with spikes and cracks and gaps in behind. The creature has extended arms like a mantis, with sharply angled ends that hook into the ice, as well as spikes on its feet to kick in. Still, it doesn’t look very secure: the ice creaks and bits break off and fall. The creature feels around for somewhere else to stick its hooks and spikes, then continues upwards – intently, methodically, almost mechanically. It is both beautiful and absolutely terrifying.

When the camera pans out, it’s even more terrifying, because of the sheer size of this frozen wall. It is vast and vertiginous, the creature a tiny dot creeping upwards, a gnat in a sweeping sub-zero landscape. Except that this gnat has no wings: if it falls, it falls. Nor does it have a rope, because it’s not a gnat or even an insect, but a man – a Canadian by the name of Marc-André Leclerc, climbing solo in the Rockies with crampons and a pair of ice-axes.

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‘We want people to freak out’: inside Hollywood’s Museum of Motion Pictures

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Boasting the shark from Jaws, the robe from the Big Lebowski, and the slippers from Oz, the Academy museum is finally open. But the real story is its exposé of Hollywood’s racist, sexist past

In 1939, the Academy of Motion Pictures published its first “players directory”, which grouped actors into categories such as “leading women” and “comediennes”, but set aside separate sections for “coloured” and “oriental” performers. The Academy removed the segregated categories a few years later, but many of the actors of colour weren’t integrated into other sections. They were eliminated.

These racist directories are on display at the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which celebrates some of the most important film-makers in history while also attempting to confront head-on the dark legacy of exclusion and discrimination in the industry. The hope is to tell a much more complicated, and accurate, story of Hollywood through the years.

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The Many Saints of Newark review – Sopranos prequel keeps it in the family

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Michael Gandolfini is goosebump-inducing as the young Tony Soprano, amid race riots and antagonism towards rival African American gangs

Maybe it was inevitable that the greatest TV show in history should spawn a feature-length prequel that is somehow disappointing: it is watchable but weirdly obtuse with a tricksy narrative reveal that doesn’t add much. The Many Saints of Newark, co-written by the Sopranos’ legendary creator David Chase and directed by Alan Taylor, gives us the childhood of a leader: the teenage Tony Soprano, growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, specifically the time of the 1967 Newark riots, which caused the “white flight” racism that explains the older Tony having that palatial home way out there in the suburbs that he drives up to in the opening credits each episode.

Young Tony is portrayed with goosebump-inducing deja vu by Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini, who played the role on TV. Tony’s sleepy-eyed sensitivity, his melancholy, his glowering resentment and dangerous hurt feelings are there in embryo. His father, Johnny, is played by Jon Bernthal, and his terrifying mother Livia by Vera Farmiga who gives a superb rendering of Livia’s own haughty mannerisms. But you could spend this entire movie hanging on for the first sign of those all-important petit mal fainting fits that the TV show said originated in Tony’s dad. Is history being rewritten, or misrememberings corrected?

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From Hogwarts to inter-galactic space: how Alfred Enoch’s career rocketed

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He gained cult status in Harry Potter, despite not even wanting to audition, then matured in How to Get Away With Murder. What’s the actor doing now? Playing 1,000-year chess in deep space

At the age of 10, Alfred Enoch was cast as Gryffindor student Dean Thomas in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. While it wasn’t the most prominent role, Thomas was one of the few black or Asian characters in the third-highest-grossing film series ever – and this, allied with his boyish good looks, has lent Enoch cult status among Potterheads. “Not to downplay it,” says Enoch, “but I wasn’t an integral character. I’ve expressed that to people and they still say, ‘Yeah, but I saw you and you looked like me.’”

Enoch was cast after catching the Potter team’s eye during a performance at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. However, he’d earlier declined the chance to audition when producers held an open call at his school. “I didn’t go for Harry Potter in the beginning because I couldn’t think of any black characters,” he says.

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Mussolini’s Sister review – interestingly quirky portrait of a grumpy octogenarian

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This acute documentary gets under the surface of its Palestinian film-maker’s sharp-tongued grandmother to the loneliness and resentment within

Juna Suleiman’s documentary about Hiam, her octogenarian grandmother who lives in Nazareth, is no journey through a picture-perfect family album. Hiam is not the cake-baking kind of grandmother. In fact, she is grumpy, foul-mouthed and very politically incorrect. It could have been quite annoying to spend more than an hour with someone so disagreeable, and yet Suleiman’s love for her grandmother’s quirks shines through, making this familial snapshot an interesting watch.

First off, Hiam is not the sister of that Mussolini. For reasons untold, her parents named one of her brothers after Il Duce. Another child, named Hitler, died in infancy. Still, the film does not dwell much on Hiam’s younger days, and instead focuses on her day-to-day activities, which include berating her ever-changing cleaners, venting bitterness about the news, and lamenting her son’s rare visits. Mostly shot inside Hiam’s apartment, the film acquires an undeniable sense of claustrophobia, which renders her bitterness understandable rather than unforgiving. Instead of turning a senior citizen into a one-dimensional cliche, the decision to capture both Hiam’s humour and her unpleasant side gives us the fullness of her personality. Hiam may look harmless, but you would think twice before crossing her.

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‘We didn’t want to do a Grease’: how Everybody’s Talking About Jamie became a film

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How do you turn hit musicals like Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and Dear Evan Hansen into films? You axe songs, throw out plots and don’t worry about anyone’s favourite bit

Choosing a stage musical to see right now can feel like browsing the cinema listings of the 1980s and 90s. Pretty Woman and Back to the Future are playing across the street from one another in London’s West End, with The Lion King, Matilda and Heathers nearby. Indecent Proposal opens next month.

The speed of traffic travelling in the opposite direction, from stage to screen, tends to be a little faster, though. A film of Dear Evan Hansen, the Broadway hit about an anxious, alienated student who pretends to have been friends with a suicide victim, has arrived only five years after it opened, with Julianne Moore and Amy Adams among the cast. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, which follows a 16-year-old budding drag queen from Sheffield, has taken just four years, picking up Richard E Grant and Sharon Horgan along the way.

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Dan Aykroyd: ‘I still have the lizard brain of a 20-year-old’

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The actor, 69, talks about crying over his kids, not being able to cook and still having 80% of his dance moves

I am actually one of the few people on the planet who is a heterochromiac syndactylite. I have webbed middle toes on both feet. I also have different coloured eyes: one is brown, one is green. I don’t know how many of us there are: I heard seven.

I think I still have the lizard brain of a 20-year-old. I wake up every morning and I have the same vision, the same perception – except when I start to move. The lag between my perception of how young I feel and that mobility… There’s a lag there.

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‘How is Pauli Murray not a household name?’ The extraordinary life of the US’s most radical activist

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She explored her gender and sexuality in the 20s, defied segregation in the 40s and inspired Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now, a film is bringing her trailblazing achievements to light

It seems inconceivable that someone like Pauli Murray could have slipped through the cracks of US history. A lawyer, activist, scholar, poet and priest, Murray led a trailblazing life that altered the course of history. She was at the forefront of the battles for racial and gender equality, but often so far out in front that her contributions went unrecognised.

In 1940, 15 years before Rosa Parks, Murray was jailed for refusing to move to the back of a bus in the Jim Crow south. In 1943, she campaigned successfully to desegregate her local diner, 17 years before the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Her work paved the way for the landmark supreme court ruling Brown v Board of Education in 1954 – which de-segregated US schools – to the extent that Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer for the NAACP civil rights group, called Murray’s book States’ Laws on Race and Color “the bible for civil rights lawyers”.

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Is James McAvoy’s improvised thriller the strangest Covid movie yet?

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In My Son, the actor goes from scene to scene without a script trying to find his child, a bizarre new low for pandemic cinema

The pandemic has subjected us to a brave new world of cinematic experiences: a seance horror on Zoom, Anne Hathaway trying to rob Harrods, Naomi Watts taking phone calls in a forest, films that have shown either admirable ingenuity during an impossible period or that it’s really OK, nay better, at times to just put your tools down and bake banana bread instead.

Related: What does Covid mean for the future of pandemic movies?

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The Activist: reality TV show to be ‘reimagined’ as documentary after backlash

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CBS says it will drop X-Factor-style competition from celebrity-fronted show after widespread criticism

A reality TV show that planned to pit activists against each other in an X-Factor style contest judged by celebrities is to be drastically “reimagined” after it sparked a backlash from campaigners.

The Activist, which had been due to air in the US in late October, prompted incredulity among many campaigners and elsewhere when its format was revealed last week, with many labelling it a “tone-deaf” distortion of true activists’ values.

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