Category Archives: Film

‘I made it as if this was the end of my life’: Scorsese on Raging Bull at 40

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At a Tribeca film festival event, the director and his star Robert De Niro discussed the legacy of the greatest boxing movie ever made

In Martin Scorsese’s 1980 magnum opus, Raging Bull, the self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta goes from the greatest to a washed-up parody of himself, clinging to his memories of the good ol’ days. For the director and star Robert De Niro, looking back on the film from the present day could have been tempting fate, a couple of ageing men reminiscing about their younger years via a movie illustrating the hazards of just that.

At this year’s closing night for De Niro’s own Tribeca film festival, during an hour-long pre-recorded conversation that preceded the evening’s screening, there was a slight hint of the rueful in the way he and dear pal “Marty” discussed the experience with emcee Leonardo DiCaprio. “Our way of making movies went down,” Scorsese proclaimed, citing the massive financial failure of the pricy Heaven’s Gate that same year as a sign that the party was over for creative talents in search of studio carte blanche. “The kind of thing we were doing was too much trouble for, ah, what they would reap from it.” De Niro clarified: “Money.”

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EU prepares to cut amount of British TV and film shown post-Brexit

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Exclusive: number of UK productions seen as ‘disproportionate’ and threat to Europe’s cultural diversity

The EU is preparing to act against the “disproportionate” amount of British television and film content shown in Europe in the wake of Brexit, in a blow to the UK entertainment industry and the country’s “soft power” abroad.

The UK is Europe’s biggest producer of film and TV programming, buoyed up by £1.4bn from the sale of international rights, but its dominance has been described as a threat to Europe’s “cultural diversity” in an internal EU document seen by the Guardian.

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‘I am very shy. It’s amazing I became a movie star’: Leslie Caron at 90 on love, art and addiction

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The legendary actor reflects on her riches-to-rags childhood, confronting depression and alcoholism – and dancing with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire

Leslie Caron and her companion, Jack, greet me at the front of their apartment. They make a well-matched couple – slight, chic, immaculately coiffured. Caron, the legendary dancer and actor, is 90 in two weeks’ time. Jack, her beloved shih tzu, is about nine.

Caron heads off to make the tea, with Sidney Bechet’s summery jazz playing in the background. I am left alone with Jack to explore the living room. It feels as if I am tunnelling through the history of 20th-century culture. Here is a photo of a pensive François Truffaut; below is a smirking Warren Beatty. The centrepiece on the wall is a huge watercolour of Caron’s great friend Christopher Isherwood, painted by his partner, Don Bachardy. To the left is Louis Armstrong, to the right Rudolf Nureyev, with whom she starred in 1977’s Valentino, and further along is Jean Renoir, who she says was like a father to her. And we have barely started.

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One in a Thousand review – Argentinian teen’s hoop dreams, hanging out and hoping

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Clarisa Navas’s film is a confident, visually engaging romance conjuring a world of teenage waiting and wanting

This is an LGBT urban pastoral from film-maker Clarisa Navas, set in a tough barrio in Corrientes province, north-eastern Argentina. Sofia Cabrera plays Iris, a teenage girl who appears to have been excluded from school – although that doesn’t make her lifestyle any more obviously aimless than all the people she’s hanging out with. Iris is obsessed with basketball and spends most of her days loafing around, shooting hoops, talking with her brother and cousins, and chatting with the neighbourhood kids, gay and straight. Then she chances across a charismatic older woman called Renata (Ana Carolina García), who has an elegantly wasted image; Renata has mysteriously been abroad for a while and apparently dances at a local club called Traumatic, where she appears to be on the fringe of sex work. Some are saying that she has HIV – although this may simply be spite. Iris and Renata are drawn to each other and soon they are in love.

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Golden Globes: two members resign from ‘toxic’ Hollywood Foreign Press Association

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Wenting Xu and Diederik van Hoogstraten cite resistance to change, watered down diversity rules and a culture of fear

Two members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the body that organises the Golden Globes, have resigned, denouncing the organisation as “toxic” in a letter obtained by the LA Times.

In their letter, Wenting Xu and Diederik van Hoogstraten said that “staying inside the association is no longer tenable for us”. They list a number of reasons, including that “the majority of the membership resists deep change”, new rules to improved diversity have been “watered down”, and that “fear of retribution, self-dealing, corruption and verbal abuse” are still central to the HFPA’s culture.

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Cotton plantations and non-consensual kisses: how Disney became embroiled in the culture wars

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The company has been addressing its historical racism and sexism, adding disclaimers to films and altering theme park rides. But these moves have stirred contempt as well as approval

Very little ammunition is required for a culture war these days, so long as your troops are primed to mobilise at the drop of a blog. Julie Tremaine and Katie Dowd, two writers for the online newspaper SFGate, discovered this last month. Their review of the revamped Snow White ride at Disneyland was generally positive, but queried a new scene showing the prince giving Snow White the all-important “true love’s kiss”.

“A kiss he gives to her without her consent, while she’s asleep, which cannot possibly be true love if only one person knows it’s happening,” they wrote. “It’s hard to understand why the Disneyland of 2021 would choose to add a scene with such old-fashioned ideas of what a man is allowed to do to a woman.”

Matters escalated quickly and predictably. Within 24 hours, the review was reported across Twitter and conservative media. Fox News ran 13 segments on the story in one day: “Cancel culture going after Snow White”; “The woke movement taking aim at Disneyland”, etc. Senator John Kennedy was brought on to express his disdain: “We are so screwed … I don’t know where these jackaloons come up with this stuff.” The UK’s Sun chimed in: “Snow White may be CANCELED” [sic]. As did Piers Morgan in the Daily Mail: “Leave Snow White’s Prince alone, you insufferable woke brats.” Then Fox News reported on that: “Piers Morgan slams consent criticism over revamped Snow White ride.” And so forth. All of them triggered by a single paragraph in an online review.

Disney increasingly finds itself caught in the crossfire of these skirmishes. Understandably, to some extent, since it is the biggest target. Already a byword for family entertainment, Disney is now the dominant purveyor of popular culture following its gradual acquisitions of Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, Avatar, Alien, The Muppets, The Simpsons and numerous other household-name properties. But having successfully captured entertainment’s centre ground, Disney now finds itself under attack on both flanks. From one side, it is criticised for its old-fashioned and bigoted legacy; from the other, it is criticised for being too “woke”. What’s an unprecedentedly powerful media corporation to do?

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Jenni Olson: ‘I remember walking out of the movie theatre like, “Yeah, I’m a cowboy!”’

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How did a little girl who loved Westerns grow up into an icon of queer cinema? As she wins a Teddy award, the filmmaker talks about a life devoted to the movies

When Jenni Olson accepts the Berlin film festival’s coveted Teddy award this month – for “embodying, living and creating queer culture” – she will join the ranks of past recipients including John Hurt, Joe Dallesandro and Tilda Swinton. “Me and Tilda, you know?” laughs the 58-year-old as she winces in the morning sunlight which is streaming into her home in Berkeley, California. With her youthful features, crisply side-parted hair and apostrophe-shaped eyes, she might have been drawn by Charles M Schulz.

“When I started my little gay film series at the University of Minnesota in 1987,” she says, “I never could’ve imagined that one of the largest film festivals in the world would recognise my work.” Along the way, she has been co-director of the San Francisco international lesbian and gay film festival as well as an influential curator, critic and archivist. She has taken her compilations of film trailers – including Homo Promo, Jodie Promo (Foster, that is) and the Jewish-themed Trailers Schmailers – to festivals around the world. Her vast collection of LGBT-themed film prints, along with the promotional materials that featured in her near-exhaustive collection The Queer Movie Poster Book, was acquired by Harvard last summer.

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Great strides: how Annie Hall’s ‘dad pants’ conquered the world

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After a year of loungewear and dressing from the waist up, these tailored but informal trousers have won over everyone from Kendall Jenner to the Duchess of Cambridge

Scrolling through the Instagram page of model and Kardashian scion Kendall Jenner, one photo, posted on 28 April, stands out. In this one, she’s not on a Vogue cover or the deck of a yacht, but crossing a New York street. And instead of a bikini or cycling shorts and a crop top, she’s wearing a pair of tailored beige trousers, cinched with a black leather belt, pleated and full in the hip, loose of leg, teamed with a white T and an oversized shirt. It’s one part Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, one part Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, one part Kennedy weekending at Martha’s Vineyard.

Two weeks later, Danielle Haim wore an identical pair of pale, full, elegantly tailored trousers on the red carpet at the Brits, just a few days after model and entrepreneur Rosie Huntington-Whiteley posed on her Instagram in the same. (Fashion sleuths point to the Igor Pant by The Row, for sale at a cool £860, as being the originator of this trend.) In the last week of May, Jennifer Lawrence was photographed in New York wearing creamy front-pleat trousers with a cropped white T-shirt on the same day that the Duchess of Cambridge, more usually a dress-wearer, wore a slightly darker pair to attend the opening of a new hospital in Kirkwall, Scotland. International travel might be virtually grounded, but there is no stopping the global spread of this look.

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The Viewing Booth review – seeing is believing in the Israel-Palestine conflict

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Volunteers respond to politically polarised film footage from Israel and the Palestinian territories in this critical look at interpretation

Even though he tries to maintain a cool, scientific demeanour, Israeli director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz finally lets slip a twinge of despair at the end of this interesting geopolitical Rorschach test. Alexandrowicz sits studiously behind a monitor as he invites a succession of volunteers to enter an adjacent booth. There, they have a choice of 40 clips to watch, snippets of life in Israel, while he asks them to share their thoughts on what they see. Half of the clips are from rightwing Israeli sources; the other half are from B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organisation that aims to document abuses of power in Palestinian territories.

Alexandrowicz quickly zeroes in on the pensive Maia, a Jewish American who supports Israel, but brings an insistent scepticism to everything she watches. He is the director of pro-Palestine documentaries such as The Inner Tour (2001) and The Law in These Parts (2011) – and believes her to be his ideal audience: a possible convert.

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Ned Beatty: the good ol’ boy who made playing the ordinary guy look easy

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From his breakthrough in Deliverance to a memorable turn in Toy Story 3, the authenticity of Beatty’s middleman gone bad made him the perfect co-star – and often stole the show

If ever a character actor personified the “good ol’ boy” archetype of Hollywood’s new cinema of the 1970s it was Ned Beatty from Louisville, Kentucky, whose broad, open, good-natured face seemed so often to be covered with a sheen of sweat – either from suppressed guilt, or tension, from discomfort in whatever sweltering southern clime he happened to find himself. His was a smiley face bounded by its prosperous double-chin and nascent combover, a face that lent reality and approachability to the movies: an authentic and worldly presence.

Ned Beatty had the hardest role to play: the middle-ranking ordinary guy: lawyer, cop, official, politician and maybe, effectively, the wingman to the conventionally better-looking male leads, and in his 70s movie heyday this tended to mean Burt Reynolds, with whom he starred in six films, including, of course, Beatty’s brilliant and brutal breakthrough: Deliverance (1972), written by James Dickey and directed by John Boorman, in which Reynolds’s sinister alpha male businessman leads his buddies Beatty, Jon Voight and Ronny Cox on a vacation canoeing trip through the deepest Georgia wilderness only to come into horrible contact with hillbillies playing banjos and bearing grudges.

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How did a £120 painting become a £320m Leonardo … then vanish?

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A film about the disputed Salvator Mundi blames the National Gallery for its role in giving credibility to the claim that it was the artist’s lost work

The National Gallery is facing controversy over its role in the tangled story of how the world’s most expensive painting emerged from obscurity before being sold for a staggering £320m, only to vanish again from the public eye.

The gallery exhibited the Salvator Mundi in its Leonardo da Vinci exhibition a decade ago when it was an unknown work with doubts about its attribution, restoration and ownership.

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Finding fangs: new film exposes illicit trade killing off Bolivia’s iconic jaguar

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Undercover documentary investigates the trafficking of Latin America’s big cat to meet demand in China

Elizabeth Unger was a 25-year-old biology graduate working as a PhD research assistant for big cat and climate projects in Latin America when she heard about the Bolivian authorities intercepting dozens of packages containing jaguar fangs sent by Chinese citizens to addresses in China.

“I was really blown away as [the story] was completely under the radar,” she says. Six years later, she is making her directorial debut with a film about the trade, which is contributing to a decline in the population of Latin America’s iconic big cat.

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Hong Kong film censors get wider ‘national security’ powers

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Observers worry rule change in Chinese city will restrict pro-democracy movement even further

Hong Kong’s censors have been given expanded powers to vet films for national security breaches in the latest blow to the Chinese city’s political and artistic freedoms.

In a statement on Friday, authorities said the film censorship ordinance had been expanded to include “any act or activity which may amount to an offence endangering national security”.

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‘Father of African cinema’ Ousmane Sembène at work – in pictures

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A look back at the career of Senegal-born film director Ousmane Sembène as his 1968 film Mandabi is released in the UK for the first time

•Mandabi is released on 11 June in cinemas, and on 28 June on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital platforms.

•Peter Bradshaw on Mandabi: classic about colonialism resonates today

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Bennifer’s rebooted! Why is Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s reunion so cheering?

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They were a tabloid dream, the super-cool fly girl and the eyeliner-wearing Caped Crusader. Now, 17 years on, Ben and Jen are together again. But what do the ultimate 00s couple mean to the TikTok age?

Brangelina. Kimye. Tomkat. Gyllenspoon. Each pairing is yet another note in the long, sad dirge of failed Hollywood romances. Blending famous monikers has been a showbiz tradition for decades, even if most of these fusions fizzle out quicker than you can say “Vaughniston” (you remember: Vince Vaughn dated Jennifer Aniston for about a minute after her breakup with Brad Pitt). But back in the early 2000s, there was one couple whose tumultuous affair and melded nickname towered above the rest, all but consuming the tabloid press for three whole years, until their abrupt, dramatic breakup just days before their planned wedding. And now, 17 years later, in a plot twist worthy of a Nancy Meyers romcom, those same not-so-young-any-more lovers have shocked the world and delighted the media by getting back together.

That’s right: like the cicadas, Bennifer has risen anew. The details of the Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez reunion are still a bit sketchy. There was a New York Post item in April reporting that the two had been observed entering the restaurant at the Pendry hotel in West Hollywood with “arms wrapped around each other”. A few days later, Affleck was spotted making an early-morning departure from Lopez’s LA home (“with a smirk” on his face, the Page Six article noted). A month after that, multiple outlets broke the news that the couple had spent a weekend at a resort in Montana. Then celebrity mag Us Weekly made it semi-official with a quote from an anonymous source: “Jen and Ben are both very happy with each [other] and excited to see where the relationship goes.”

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Power dressing: which superhero has the best costume?

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From Superman’s Y-fronts to Hulk’s tattered shorts, superheroes have made their fair share of fashion faux pas – but whose outfit actually works?

In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it, once and for all

When saving the planet, it’s important to dress the part. This isn’t like taking the bins out. You can’t hang off a chopper in a slanket and Crocs. Superheroes understand this. Unlike James Bond – who is permanently tuxed up as if he’s about to host a pharmaceutical industry awards bash – the offspring of Marvel and DC Comics have brought spandex, codpieces and vulcanised rubber out of the niche-interest sex-toy trade and into the multiplex. But which superhero has the best costume?

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Bob Odenkirk: ‘Soon people won’t remember Breaking Bad’

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He charmed as slimeball lawyer Saul in the drugs drama and its spinoff – but now Bob Odenkirk has gone badass in action thriller Nobody. Has he left his comedy days behind?

On the surface, Bob Odenkirk’s new film is entirely preposterous. As the story of a man who goes on a murder spree after his house is broken into, Nobody is an all-out, full-throated action movie. In one scene, 58-year-old Odenkirk tears a handrail off the inside of a bus and beats a man senseless with it.

However, as he explains, the story stems from something much more personal. “My family had two break-ins,” he reveals from his home in LA, where he’s sitting beneath a vast Chinatown poster. “It was very damaging.”

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How Tove Jansson’s love of nature shaped the world of the Moomins

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The Finnish artist’s work was hugely influenced by her passion for the great outdoors – in particular the tiny island of Klovharun

In 1964, when she was in her 50s, the Moomin creator Tove Jansson settled on her dream island. Klovharun in the Finnish archipelago is tiny – some 6,000 sq metres – and isolated, “a rock in the middle of nowhere”, according to Jansson’s niece, Sophia. It has scarcely any foliage, no running water and no electricity. Yet for Jansson, it was an oasis. For 18 years she and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent long summers there, heading out from Helsinki as soon as the ice broke in April, leaving only in early October. The island meant “privacy, remoteness, intimacy, a rounded whole without bridges or fences”.

Klovharun encapsulates something of Jansson’s originality as an artist and writer – and her human presence. Her illustrated Moomin books, which began to be published just after the second world war, brought her phenomenal acclaim and devotion. The tales of amiable troll creatures have been taken to generations of hippy hearts; their pear-shaped faces have adorned a million ties. Their marketing triumph – in which Jansson enthusiastically participated – has overshadowed her other achievements as a painter, novelist, short-story writer, anti-Nazi cartoonist, and designer of magazine covers. Success may also have obscured how ambivalent she was, how often on the cusp of identities. She was brought up in Finland speaking Swedish, had male and female lovers, told her stories in pictures and in prose, lived on water as well as land. More and more she appears as a pioneer. Not least in her crystalline descriptions of the natural world.

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After Love director Aleem Khan: ‘I walked around Mecca and prayed not to be gay’

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The director’s debut feature draws on his experiences of loss and identity confusion, with a memorable role for Joanna Scanlon as a fictionalised version of his white English Muslim-convert mother

Mary, the central character of Aleem Khan’s debut film After Love, is a white English woman who met her Pakistani husband as a teenager on the London housing estate where they both lived. After they got married, they moved to the Kent coast. Mary converted to Islam, started to wear traditional dress, learned how to cook curries from scratch and to speak Punjabi.

It does not take an enormous amount of detective work to understand from where Khan drew inspiration: his mother is a white English woman who met her Pakistani husband as a teenager on the London housing estate where they both lived. After they got married, they moved to the Kent coast; she converted to Islam, started to wear traditional dress, learnt how to cook curries from scratch and to speak Punjabi.

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