Category Archives: Film

Marvel and DC face backlash over pay: ‘They sent a thank you note and $5,000 – the movie made $1bn’

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As the comics giants make billions from their storylines and characters, writers and artists are speaking out about their struggles for fair payment

Watch any superhero movie and you will see a credit along the lines of “based on the comic book created by”, usually with the name of a beloved and/or long-dead writer or artist. But deep, deep in the credits scroll, you will also see “special thanks” to a long roster of comic book talent, most of them still alive, whose work forms the skeleton and musculature of the movie you just watched. Scenes storyboarded directly from Batman comics by Frank Miller; character arcs out of Thor comics by Walt Simonson; entire franchises, such as the Avengers films or Disney+ spinoff The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, that couldn’t exist without the likes of Kurt Busiek or Ed Brubaker.

The “big two” comic companies – Marvel and DC - may pretend they’ve tapped into some timeless part of the human psyche with characters such as Superman and the Incredible Hulk, but the truth is that their most popular stories have been carefully stewarded through the decades by individual artists and writers. But how much of, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) $20bn-plus box office gross went to those who created the stories and characters in it? How are the unknown faces behind their biggest successes being treated?

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Kiefer Sutherland and Rob Reiner: how we made Stand By Me

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‘River Phoenix was like a 13-year-old James Dean. There was so much soul there’

This was the only audition where I did the reading and was hired right there in the room. I absolutely adored Spinal Tap, so to get that kind of affirmation from a director like Rob Reiner at that time in my life was really powerful.

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True Stories: Spaces review – impressive short docs from folk horror to a Lebanese marvel

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This short film collection from the True Story platform ranges across continents to look at how we interact with our environments

Deeply psychogeographical, this collection of documentary shorts from the streaming platform True Story roams among spaces old and new, and across continents. Personal and public memories are intertwined, creating portraits of how human beings interact with their environments, and vice versa.

Paul Heintz’s nocturnal Shānzhài Screens is a meditative study of liminal urban spaces, shot in a Chinese district that specialises in fine-art reproductions. Rectangular frames populate the screen, from flickering apartment windows, hurried video calls, to endless replicas of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Authenticity is elusive, and loneliness reigns.

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Rosanna Arquette: ‘I fear the world will fall into the hands of fascist dictators – and white supremacy’

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The actor and film-maker on being ghosted for her politics, the best kiss of her life and having an angel experience

Born in New York City, Rosanna Arquette, 61, starred with Madonna in the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan, for which she won a Bafta. Her other movies include Pulp Fiction and Crash. In 2002, she made Searching For Debra Winger, a documentary about women in the film industry; her podcast series is called Radical Musings. She is married, has a daughter and lives in Los Angeles.

When were you happiest?
I am trying to find a little happiness at least once a day, so this morning.

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‘Deaf is not a costume’: Marlee Matlin on surviving abuse and casting authentically

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The only deaf actor to win an Academy Award discusses going to rehab, speaking out about William Hurt and starring in deaf drama Coda

When early financial backers of Marlee Matlin’s new film, Coda, expressed their preference for hiring big-name actors to play the roles of two major deaf characters – her onscreen husband and son – she threatened to quit. She told them that deaf actors should play characters written as deaf. “I said: time out. This is not right. It’s not authentic and it’s not going to work. If you go down that route, I’m out, because I don’t want to be part of that effort of faking deaf. I’m glad they listened.”

I can’t imagine anyone not listening to Matlin. Speaking from her home in Los Angeles, she is funny and warm, but there is something intense about her, almost intimidating. She sits straight-backed, her focus sharp. She is not a woman to mince her words – which are translated from American Sign Language (ASL) by her longtime interpreter and producing partner, Jack Jason, who is also on the call from his front room. The pair have been working together since 1985, just before she won the best actress Oscar at 21 for her first film role, playing a young deaf woman in the 1986 drama Children of a Lesser God – beating Sigourney Weaver (who was up for Aliens), Jane Fonda, Kathleen Turner and Sissy Spacek.

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Zola review – pulp-factual viral tweet becomes an icily slick urban thriller

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Aziah ‘Zola’ Wells’s viral story of her crazily dangerous 2015 trip to Florida in search of pole-dancing money is brought to the screen with seductive comedy

In 2015, a part-time dancer from Detroit called Aziah “Zola” Wells went viral with a cheeky Twitter thread purporting to tell the pulp-factual tale of her recent, crazily dangerous road trip to Florida with someone called Jessica, whom she’d only just met. This woman had persuaded Zola there was big money in pole-dancing for rich clients in Tampa, but Zola had to share the car with Jessica’s creepy boyfriend and even creepier pimp, and soon it was clear that Zola was going to have to do much more than dance. She was in way over her head.

Or was she? Followers of Zola’s posts loved them at least partly for how outrageously unreliable they were: Zola was clearly embellishing, or pre-emptively giving her side of the story before Jessica did the same. Now this has been turned into a very entertaining lowlife crime comedy from director and co-writer Janicza Bravo, a film that preserves the fishy flavour of the online original – if perhaps only semi-intentionally – and has interesting things to say about the exhaustingly performative and self-promotional world of social media.

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Jessie Cave on body image, bereavement and being relentless: ‘I don’t have any secrets’

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The actor, comic and writer talks about her bestselling debut novel, the cruelty of costume fittings, how it felt to be in the Harry Potter franchise – and finding hope in small things

As a compulsive diary writer – she has kept one since she was eight – Jessie Cave knows that, unless it gets written down, life gets forgotten. She is glad, then, that she wrote her debut novel, Sunset, because the way she felt at the time “would have just gone, and then you’re in a different place and you don’t remember”. This book, says Cave, was “absolutely the only thing I could write during that period”.

In March 2019, her younger brother Ben died in an accident aged 27. Her book was written in the aftermath, that manic feeling that sometimes comes with grief pushing her on. It went straight to No 1 on the Sunday Times’ bestseller list after being published in June. “I don’t know if I would have that energy now,” she says.

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Shailene Woodley: ‘Authenticity is my love language’

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Despite being only 29, Shailene Woodley already has 25 years’ acting experience under her belt. Here, the star of Big Little Lies and Divergent talks about being free-willed, her hippy passions and her late-night calls with Kate Winslet

The one and only time Shailene Woodley beams during our time together – a long conversation over Zoom, on a bright weekday morning – is when my young son sneaks into the room in which I’m bent over a laptop, points at the stranger appearing on-screen, and asks, not quietly, “Who’s that?”

There is nothing to do but introduce them.

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‘I never saw my guitar again’: readers on belongings they lost in a breakup

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Long after two people have gone their separate ways, some partings still rankle. Readers reflect on the beloved items they left behind

Even though my breakup was amicable, I felt a lot of guilt – so when I moved out I said: “Keep it all.” But, in the years since, there have been a few items of kitchenware that I wish I’d held on to: a Le Creuset casserole dish, my favourite mug, a digital cooking thermometer, the plastic bowl attachment for my stick blender (the blender itself I retained at her insistence, but I forgot all the accessories that came with it). There never seemed like a good time to ask for any of it back – I hope she’s at least getting some use out of them. Anonymous, Australia

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Scarlett Johansson suing Disney over Black Widow streaming release

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The actor claims that the studio breached her contract by releasing her standalone Marvel adventure on Disney+

Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney over the recent release of Black Widow.

The actor is claiming that the studio’s decision to launch her first, and last, Marvel standalone film on Disney+ as well as cinemas is a breach of contract.

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‘Stop patronising me and give me an interview’: the female journalists speaking up for India’s poor

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India’s only all-women news organisation is the subject of an award-winning documentary. The film-makers explain their inspiring courage and energy

A woman explains how a group of four men repeatedly broke into her house and raped her; six times so far. Did she go to the police? Yes, but officers refused to investigate. Instead, they threatened her and her husband. “These men can do anything. They can even kill us,” the victim says to the reporter, Meera, who is filming on her smartphone. As Meera leaves, the woman’s husband tells her that she is their only hope. “We don’t trust anyone except Khabar Lahariya.”

Khabar Lahariya is India’s only all-female news organisation. Based in Uttar Pradesh, its journalists passionately believe in reporting rural issues through a feminist lens.

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The Suicide Squad review – eyeball-blitzing supervillain reboot

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Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn is a good directorial fit for the humour and freaky violence of DC’s bad-guy jamboree

DC’s new Suicide Squad movie announces itself as different from the coolly received first film from 2016 simply by adding “The” to the title, maybe sneakily trying for an unacknowledged rebrand or reboot. James Gunn, also in charge of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, is brought on board as director and co-writer. This second Squad outing (if you don’t count last year’s standalone Harley Quinn adventure Birds of Prey) is a long, loud, often enjoyable and amusing film that blitzes your eyeballs and eardrums and covers all the bases. There is Guardians-style comedy mixing humans and talking animals, there is freaky violence – including what I have to say is a gruesomely impressive interior-anatomical shot, showing a knife plunging into the still-beating heart – and there is colossal CGI spectacle for the final act in which a giant thing runs rampant in a city, while the gang look up at it; a trope that has become almost legally mandatory for superhero movies.

Viola Davis once again brings a touch of class to the Suicide Squad franchise as the chillingly manipulative security chief Amanda Waller who now springs supervillain Bloodsport (Idris Elba) from jail so that he can head up an elite new crew of misfits, desperadoes and undesirables. These include Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), the ironically belligerent Peacemaker (John Cena), King Shark – a great big talking shark in Hulk-ish stretchy shorts – voiced by Sylvester Stallone, Ratcatcher II (Daniela Melchior), who commands an army of rats wherever she goes, and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who fires molten polka-dots at the enemy, revving himself up for the task by imagining that this is his overbearing mother. There is also a kind of B-team of Squadders whose job is to be hilariously expendable.

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Jungle Cruise review – the Rock’s Disney theme-park actioner takes predictable turns

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Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson are romancing riverboat adventurers in a ride-turned-film that quickly becomes bland

The Jungle Cruise theme-park ride is a riverboat trip that Disneyland visitors have been queuing up for since the 1950s: an old-timey craft travelling down an artificial jungle river, with a jolly captain pointing out animatronic animals lurching out of the artificial undergrowth. Now it’s been adapted into a blandly inoffensive piece of generic entertainment: screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who once gave us Bad Santa and I Love You Phillip Morris) have mashed up The African Queen with Raiders of the Lost Ark, and with what I admit is a surreal splash of Aguirre, Wrath of God.

It’s lively enough for the first 20 minutes. The year is 1916, and Emily Blunt plays Lily Houghton, a haughty yet idealistic British scientist, much patronised by the male establishment in London. She imperiously hires a riverboat in Brazil to find the much-rumoured “Tree of Life” somewhere in the jungle. Its captain is a cynical-with-a-heart-of-gold rogue called Frank Wolff, man-mountainishly played by Dwayne Johnson. After the traditional meet-cute, their growing romance plays off the comedy turn provided by Jack Whitehall, playing the other passenger: Lily’s foppish, neurotic younger brother MacGregor. At one stage, Whitehall’s prissy, wussy Englishman explains to Dwayne Johnson that he is gay – or rather, he says something indirect about being not as other men, and the subject is never raised again, Edwardian reticence dovetailing nicely with Disney family values. It is a stereotype that Walt himself might have recognised, while also approving of the obvious heterosexuality of Frank with his muscles, boots and sailor’s cap.

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The Green Knight review: Dev Patel takes a magical and masterly quest

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David Lowery’s complex, visually sumptuous and uncommercial tale of Arthurian legend revels in upending expectations

Equal parts folk, prog rock and metal, The Green Knight takes place at the inflection point when one version of the old world was supplanted by the next. In David Lowery’s liberty-taking interpretation of the character’s 14th-century origin poem, the headstrong yet not-quite-valiant Sir Gawain (Dev Patel, superb) traverses an England caught between the mystical pagan religions and the nascent Christianity soon to change the face of the nation.

At first, subtler touches denote the friction between the two, as in the cross-cutting juxtaposition of a supernatural blood-and-bone ritual against the quasi-biblical imagery of an ageing Arthur’s court. (The king’s crown doesn’t take the shape of a golden disc framing his head for nothing.) By the time near the third act that Lowery reveals his key reference point to be Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, another mounting of myth invested in mortal frailty and unconcerned with textual fidelity, it’s apparent that the maturation of one man is meant to coincide with that of an entire society.

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Idris Elba: ‘I used work to exorcise my demons’

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The actor was working as a bouncer when he got a small part in a new show called The Wire. Two decades on, he’s a blockbuster fixture. The Suicide Squad star talks about fighting for his big break, losing his dad, and why acting helped him out of a ‘dark, weird junction’

“I appreciate my quiet time, I really do,” Idris Elba tells me, “but I didn’t choose a career in quiet time.” At 48, his life seems relentlessly full of activity, projects, causes, releases. He’s the star of an imminent summer blockbuster, The Suicide Squad. He’s a rapper who releases music online at a rate of about a track a month. He hosts a podcast. He’s just released a new line of T-shirts. Earlier in 2021, Elba signed a deal with HarperCollins to write children’s books. He and his wife, the Canadian model Sabrina Dhowre Elba, have recently been petitioning world leaders (France’s, Belgium’s) on behalf of rural farmers in Africa. The couple have also co- designed a Louboutin sandal. When Elba sits down to chat to me over Zoom, it’s during a break between night shoots on a new movie he’s making, and I’m tempted to tell him to forget about it; shut the laptop; sleep.

Is he someone who hates sitting still?

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Nope: what on earth is Jordan Peele’s new film about?

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The Oscar-winning creator of Get Out and Us has released a mysterious new poster for a film called Nope, causing mass speculation online

Yesterday, seemingly out of the blue, Jordan Peele announced the name and poster of his third movie. The film is called Nope and the poster is a picture of an ominous-looking storm cloud hovering above a mountain village. Do we know what it’s about? Nope. Do we have any sort of insight into the film whatsoever? Nope. Would it be a good idea for us to attempt to extrapolate the premise for the film using nothing but a one-word title and a picture of a cloud? Nope. Are we going to do it anyway? Sure, why not.

☁️ pic.twitter.com/iiDRwVLmbr

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How M Night Shyamalan got his groove back

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The film-maker’s latest thriller Old marks yet another step back into the public’s good graces after a string of misfires

Like a mushroom – one of the appetizing yet poisonous species, perhaps – M Night Shyamalan thrives in dark, contained spaces. His latest film Old isn’t physically enclosed, the majority taking place on an idyllic tropical inlet with gorgeous vistas of sand, sky and surf, though its visitors will soon learn that this beckoning setting wants to kill them and isn’t so easily escaped. But narratively speaking, it’s a tighter and more focused movie than we’ve seen from the film-maker in some time, and not so coincidentally, it finds him in top form. Planting nearly a dozen characters in a fixed locale, plunging them into terror, and letting the tension mount plays to the strengths of an unpredictable artist who shines under minimal, Twilight Zone-style parameters. The corollary to this notion reveals the fatal flaw that’s dealt his reputation and career so many ups and downs over nearly 30 years of film-making: a tragic excess of ambition.

Related: Old review – M Night Shyamalan’s fast-ageing beach horror is top notch hokum

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‘My son reeks of Persona’: a week with a scent inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s most challenging film

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The perfume was specially commissioned by organisers of the annual Bergman Week festival on the island on which the Swedish director was born. But what does it smell like?

On Monday morning the postman delivers a parcel from Sweden. Inside is Persona, a perfume inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s most demanding, difficult, abrasive film. It gives us Bergman in a bottle; the arthouse atomised. I spray it on my wrist and then on my wife’s and we stare at each other through a mist of droplets. The perfume is distinctive, but does that mean it’s good?

After a long, anxious moment, my wife nods in relief. “This is actually all right,” she says. “It’s herby. It’s lavender. It smells like the sea.”

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Riders of Justice review – Mads Mikkelsen revenge thriller turns screwball

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Anders Thomas Jensen’s film is far-fetched, tonally wayward and shouldn’t work at all, but somehow it all comes together

The poster image of a grey-bearded, shaven-headed, tooled-up, mean-looking Mads Mikkelsen, combined with that title, might set alarm bells ringing … along the lines of, “Oh no, he’s doing a Taken.” Blessedly, rather than giving us a straightahead middle-aged revenge thriller, this unpredictable Danish film takes apart the whole trope. There are action thrills, to be sure, but they are folded into what becomes a sort of group therapy session on the psychology of grief, guilt, vengeance, chance and coincidence. Even more blessedly, it’s often hilarious.

Mikkelsen plays Markus, a military commander who is recalled from Afghanistan when his wife is killed in a train crash. He might have a particular set of skills, as Liam Neeson would put it, but emotional intelligence is not one of them. Markus refuses counselling and struggles to connect with his teenage daughter. Fortunately, along comes Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a maths geek who happened to be on the same train as Markus’s wife. He is accompanied by eccentric sidekicks Lennart (Lars Brygmann), and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro). They are convinced the crash was not an accident but a targeted killing connected to a violent biker gang.

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Luz: The Flower of Evil review – arty horror strangely mutes its women

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Colombian horror about a micro-cult is rather too fascinated by the barbarity of its leader, rather than the daughters he has hidden from the world

This bold and disturbing arthouse horror from first-time feature director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate feels like it could be set sometime in the 19th century. It’s about a tiny religious cult based in the wildly beautiful Colombian mountains: the group’s leader is El Señor (Conrado Osorio), a farmer who looks like a cowboy in the Clint Eastwood mould, with a macho growl; his trio of daughters wear frontier prairie dresses. But we must be closer to the present day: in an early scene the eldest, 23-year-old Laila (Andrea Esquivel), brings him a 1980s cassette player that she has found in the woods and she is spellbound by this unknown contraption. El Señor says the devil lurks inside.

It’s an intriguing set-up, and cinematographer Nicolás Caballero Arenas shoots the lush landscape through what looks like a trippy filter; blazing sunsets and garish rainbows give the film a quasi-fairytale, almost surreal feel. El Señor has raised his daughters in total ignorance of the world outside their community of a dozen or so. But the film is depressingly thin on the women; often it seems more interested in arranging them in arty tableaux than investigating the way that isolation has shaped their personalities and how they see the world. The wafty Terrence Malick-ish voiceover written for Laila doesn’t exactly fill in the psychological gaps.

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