Category Archives: Film

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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The Card Counter review – Paul Schrader’s slow-burn revenge noir ticks all his boxes

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Oscar Isaac is a blank-eyed poker player with a past in Schrader’s latest gathering of lost, tormented souls

Paul Schrader makes films about lost souls in torment and unachievable goals, the sort of bleak existential purgatories that speak to our own uglier moments. Ahead of the Venice press screening of his latest production, an impromptu security cordon makes more than 100 guests late, after which they are only allowed into the cinema in small dribs and drabs - a tense, shuffling progress that extends throughout the film’s opening half-hour. The critics are in uproar; the ushers get lairy. Wherever he is, I imagine that Schrader himself would approve of the show.

On screen, The Card Counter provides another stylish, slow-burning account of Schrader’s lonesome samurai, a figure who can crop up in all walks of life: as a taxi driver, an escort, a drug dealer, a priest. On this occasion he’s embodied by a blank-eyed Oscar Isaac, who wears his scuffed leather jacket like a bulletproof vest. William Tell (formerly Tillich) is a veteran of Abu Ghraib and served eight years for his crimes. He now earns a living at the card tables and roulette wheels of middle America. The film has him driving the strip malls at night or prowling the stygian bowels of interchangeable casinos, with their patterned carpets and heavy black drapes. These joints have lights blazing everywhere and yet always appear cloaked in shadow. The gamblers, one worries, bring the darkness in with them.

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Michelle Yeoh: ‘Jackie Chan thought women belonged in the kitchen – until I kicked his butt’

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The kung fu goddess talks about her most eye-popping stunts, her yearning to do another Crazy Rich Asians, and her outrageously enjoyable new Marvel movie, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Ten minutes into my conversation with Michelle Yeoh, there is a misunderstanding. We are discussing her character in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, an outrageously enjoyable new Marvel adventure about a San Francisco parking valet trying to ignore his destiny as a martial arts warrior. Yeoh plays Ying Nan, a beneficent gatekeeper who lives on the far side of an enchanted bamboo forest. Another character, played by Awkwafina, refers to Ying as “an awesome magical kung fu goddess”. When I mention this, Yeoh thinks Awkwafina made the remark about her. “Oh, that’s so sweet!” she says. “Of course, I already knew Awkwafina because we were both in Crazy Rich Asians.”

There’s no need to point out the error, because it is perfectly true: Yeoh really is an awesome magical kung fu goddess. No one would argue with that. Not the millions who gasped as she skipped nimbly up walls and across rooftops in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Nor the ones who flocked to her early Hong Kong action movies with the likes of Jackie Chan and Cynthia Rothrock. Not the ones who were first introduced to her in the Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. And certainly not Oliver Stone, who called her “a woman of elegance and magnificent grace – the young grande dame of Hong Kong cinema”. Nor Quentin Tarantino, who rushed to her bedside when she was in a body cast for a dislocated neck and cracked rib sustained after falling 18ft on to her head while filming The Stunt Woman in 1996. “He insisted on seeing me and sat on two pillows at my feet and recounted my movies frame by frame,” she later said.

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Why is Spike Lee’s 9/11 docuseries so controversial?

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His new HBO series has been re-edited after backlash over featuring 9/11 ‘truthers’ – but a thread of distrust remains

Spike Lee is no stranger to controversy, but pre-emption is new for him. His incendiary work has inspired scandals both righteous (Do the Right Thing frightened a complacent America with its vision of urban unrest) and regrettable (the Jewish club owners in Mo’ Better Blues attracted charges of antisemitism), and now, his new docuseries NYC Epicenters 9/11 —> 2021½ has landed him in the same hot water that never seems to cool.

Related: Two decades after 9/11, the real threat to the US is our own far right | Harsha Panduranga

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Shorta review – Danish urban thriller gets the heart pumping

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Two cops are stranded in hostile territory when an act of police brutality triggers a riot in this slick action film

Denmark’s reputation as the land of tolerance, equality and cosy contentment takes a battering in this superslick urban thriller directed with adrenaline and savvy by first timers Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders Ølholm. “Shorta” is Arabic for “police”, and the movie opens with black teenager Talib Ben Hassi lying face down, a white police officer on his back. “I can’t breathe,” he pleads. We don’t see Talib again but his name is repeated over and over: on the streets in Svalegårdena, the fictional estate where he grew up; by TV journalists reporting on his condition in intensive care; at the police station where damage limitation is in overdrive.

Officers are warned to stay out of Svalegårdena – a powder keg waiting to explode. The shift commander puts solidly decent Jens (Simon Sears) in a car with repellent racist Mike (Jacob Hauberg Lohmann), a man who demands respect by bullying and intimidation. The script sets up these familiar cop stereotypes then messes with them – not massively convincingly to be honest. Jens in particular I found difficult to get a handle on; this is a film where characters act in ways to make the plot tick more than anything else. Things go wrong when Mike stops and searches cheeky Arab kid Amos (Tarek Zayat). He goes in hard, humiliates Amos, arrests him; at that moment news breaks that Talib is dead, triggering a riot.

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Frank Oz on life as Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy and Yoda: ‘I’d love to do the Muppets again but Disney doesn’t want me’

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He played some of the most memorable characters of all time on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street - then became a brilliant comedy director. What is he most proud of?

I ask Frank Oz if he feels like the Paul McCartney to Jim Henson’s John Lennon, the one left behind to carry the flame after his revered creative partner suddenly and shockingly died. Oz takes a deep breath and turns his head to the side, thinking.

If you grew up in the 1970s and 80s, your childhood was shaped by Henson and Oz and their work with the Muppets, just as the kids who grew up in the 50s and 60s did so in the shadow of Lennon and McCartney. Even if you weren’t a devoted fan of the Muppets themselves, you couldn’t help but take in their influence osmotically, what with The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, the Muppets movies and Labyrinth swirling in the atmosphere. I was pretty much raised on the Muppets, just as I now raise my own kids on them, and I cannot remember a time when Henson and Oz’s creations were not stamped in my mind’s eye.

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Ed Asner, who played Lou Grant in two hit shows, dies aged 91

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  • Actor shone in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and spin-off
  • Spell as Screen Actors Guild president ended over liberal views

Ed Asner, a burly and prolific character actor who became a star in middle age as the gruff but lovable newsman Lou Grant, first in the hit comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show and later in the drama Lou Grant, died on Sunday. He was 91.

Related: Ed Asner obituary

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