At least 80 film-makers and stars sign open letter after German festival jury president Wim Wenders says they should keep out of politics
More than 80 current and former participants of the Berlinale, including Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton and Adam McKay have signed an open letter condemning the festival’s “silence” on Gaza.
It comes after the film festival was swept up in what it called a “media storm” over the alleged sidelining of political discourse at the event.
Continue reading...Recognised with an honorary Academy Award in 2016, Wiseman directed and produced almost 50 films with a lifelong commitment to curiosity and naturalism
Frederick Wiseman, the prolific film-maker whose documentaries primarily explored US public institutions and communities, has died aged 96.
His death on Monday was announced in a joint statement from the Wiseman family and his production company, Zipporah Films.
Continue reading...From the classic To Kill a Mockingbird to blockbuster Gone in 60 Seconds, the Oscar-winning actor’s films spanned a remarkable range
Robert Duvall, the veteran actor who had a string of roles in classic American films including Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, M*A*S*H and To Kill a Mockingbird, has died aged 95.
“Bob passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by love and comfort,” wrote his wife, Luciana Duvall, in a message on Facebook.
Continue reading...Iranian film-maker won Cannes film festival’s Palme D’Or prize earlier this year for It Was Just an Accident
Iran has sentenced the Palme d’Or-winning film-maker Jafar Panahi in absentia to one year in prison and a travel ban over “propaganda activities” against the country.
The sentence includes a two-year ban on leaving Iran and prohibition of Panahi from membership of any political or social groups, his lawyer Mostafa Nili said, adding that they would file an appeal.
Continue reading...The actor met the future president while making Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and says he is ‘not scared’ of him
Actor Josh Brolin says President Trump was a “different guy” when he first met him in 2009, and that “there is no greater genius than [Trump] in marketing”.
Brolin was speaking to the Independent to promote his new film Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery and said that while his clergyman character was not based on the president, there was a similarity in that once he “garners a sense of power, then there are no boundaries”.
Continue reading...India’s prime minister among those paying tribute to celebrated actor whose career spanned six decades
Dharmendra, one of the most enduring stars of India’s Bollywood cinema, has died at the age of 89.
Born Dharam Singh Deol, but later known as Dharmendra, he rose to fame in the 1960s and became one of the most celebrated and popular stars of Indian cinema in a career that spanned six decades.
Continue reading...Actor who appeared in My Own Private Idaho, Blade, Armageddon and Dogville, as well as Madonna music videos and video games, died on Sunday
Udo Kier, the German actor who appeared in 275 roles across Hollywood and European cinema, including multiple films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Gus Van Sant and Lars von Trier, has died aged 81.
Kier died on Sunday morning, his partner Delbert McBride told Variety. The actor died in hospital in Palm Springs, California, his friend the photographer Michael Childers announced on social media. No cause of death was given.
Continue reading...Former PM to examine issue of trust in politics and Oscar-winning actor’s show will discuss AI
The former prime minister Theresa May is to guest edit Radio 4’s Today programme and use it to explore the issue of dwindling trust in politics.
May, who resigned in 2019 with a tearful statement about the honour she felt in holding the office, will edit Today on New Year’s Eve.
Continue reading...Jackson’s songs are back on charts and biopic trailer racked up 116m views in 24 hours, yet there is a certain hesitation
Michael Jackson’s voodoo classic Thriller was high on Billboard’s Hot 100 in the week of 15 November, handing the 16-years-gone King of Pop a record for having a Top 10 hit across six different decades. Simultaneously, Jackson also broke records for receiving 116m views in 24 hours for the trailer of a new biopic, Michael, set for release in April.
Millions of fans may be excited and primed for a Jackson biopic. For comparison, the trailer beat out Taylor Swift’s Eras tour preview and it will join a procession of recent music biopics about Bruce Springsteen, Amy Winehouse, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Elton John. The most successful of all – the Freddie Mercury and Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody – took in nearly a billion dollars at the box office.
Continue reading...Footage shows the man jumping the red carpet barricade of the Singapore premiere of Wicked: For Good, then rushing towards and embracing the star
A court in Singapore has charged a man who grabbed Ariana Grande at a premiere of Wicked: For Good on Thursday night with being a public nuisance.
Video footage shows Johnson Wen jumping over a barricade at Universal Studios Singapore and rushing at Grande on the red carpet. Grande’s co-star Cynthia Erivo immediately jumped in to help protect her and Wen was moved away.
Continue reading...The voices of the Oscar-winning actors can now be used to create AI-generated versions in a new deal with ElevenLabs
Oscar-winning actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have both signed a deal with the AI audio company ElevenLabs.
The New York-based company can now create AI-generated versions of their voices as part of a bid to solve a “key ethical challenge” in the artificial intelligence industry’s alliance with Hollywood.
Continue reading...Margot Robbie’s company to make movie based on Northern Ireland academics’ stories of poverty and prison
It started as a trawl of dusty archives for an academic project about female Irish emigrants in Canada and the US by two history professors, a worthy but perhaps niche topic for research.
The subjects, after all, were human flotsam from Ireland’s diaspora whose existence was often barely recorded, let alone remembered.
Continue reading...New Zealand film-maker became a Hollywood fixture in the 90s and 00s, including making Pierce Brosnan’s last 007 movie, before returning to his home country
Lee Tamahori, the New Zealand director of Once Were Warriors and Die Another Day, has died aged 75.
In a statement to Radio New Zealand, Tamahori’s family said he had Parkinson’s and died “peacefully at home”.
Continue reading...Participants ask for their films not to be shown at IndieChina event, which was due to launch this weekend
An independent film festival due to start in New York this weekend has been cancelled after several film-makers pulled out due to harassment from the Chinese authorities, raising concerns about transnational repression.
The inaugural IndieChina film festival was planned to take place between 8 and 15 November. But on 5 November the festival’s curator, Zhu Rikun, posted on Facebook that he had been forced to cancel 80% of the planned screenings because film-makers had pulled out.
Continue reading...Family pays tribute to actor who was a ‘bright, sparky, witty presence on stage and screen’
The Shirley Valentine actor Pauline Collins has died aged 85, her family has announced.
She died peacefully, surrounded by her family, in her care home in Highgate, north London, having had Parkinson’s disease for several years, they said.
Continue reading...Actor who said in 2015 that a Trump presidency would be ‘the end of the world’ says celebrities make no difference to how people vote
Jennifer Lawrence has said she no longer feels it appropriate to speak out against the Trump administration, lest she exacerbate unhelpful debate and further divisions.
“I don’t really know if I should,” said Lawrence in an interview with the New York Times. “During the first Trump administration, I felt like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But as we’ve learned, election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for.
Continue reading...Halloween weekend failed to make numbers jump, adding up to the weakest monthly performance – other than during the pandemic – for three decades
Box office earnings in October have crashed to levels not seen since the late 1990s, with Halloween weekend becoming the worst of the year so far.
According to a report in Variety, cinema takings for October in North America totalled $425m (£323m), the lowest figure since October 1997, when it was $385m – not counting October 2020, when North American cinemas only took $63m as moviegoing was severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Continue reading...Akinola Davies Jr’s Nigeria-set drama has 12 nominations, including best film and besr director
Nigeria-set drama My Father’s Shadow is the leading contender at this year’s British independent film awards (Bifas), after it scooped 12 nominations, including best British independent film, best director for Akinola Davies Jr, and best screenplay for Davies’s brother Wale. The film came out ahead of Pillion, adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’s coming-of-age relationship story, which got 10 nominations, and biopic I Swear, which got nine.
My Father’s Shadow, which stars Sope Dirisu and is Davies’s debut feature as a director, premiered at the Cannes film festival to admiring reviews. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described it as “a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives”. The film is yet to be released in the UK, but has already come out in Nigeria.
Continue reading...French-Turkish actor appeared in a string of high-profile films, as well as hit BBC series The Missing
Tchéky Karyo, who appeared in some of director Luc Besson’s biggest hits and a string of international films, died on Friday at the age of 72, his family have announced.
A statement from his wife and children sent to AFP said he had “succumbed to cancer”.
Continue reading...Regional authority is investing €1.5m in the project but has stipulations about featuring ‘identifiable locations’ on screen and the film premiering at an international film festival
The Madrid regional government is hoping to harness the power of film tourism by investing €1.5m (£1.3m) in a new Woody Allen movie that will be shot in and around the Spanish capital and which will be contractually obliged to feature the word “Madrid” in its title.
Regional authorities are confident the 89-year-old film-maker’s next project could do for Madrid what Roman Holiday did for Rome tourism in the early 1950s, and what Sex and the City and Emily in Paris have more recently done to increase visitor numbers to New York and the French capital.
Continue reading...