Category Archives: Film

Friday Night Dinner star Paul Ritter dies of brain tumour at 54

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Ritter, who also appeared in films including Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, died at home alongside his wife and two sons

The actor Paul Ritter has died of a brain tumour at the age of 54, his agent has told the Guardian. Ritter who starred as the family patriarch Martin in Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner alongside Tamsin Greig, Simon Bird and Tom Rosenthal died on Monday.

In a statement, his agent said that the actor, who also appeared in numerous films including Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Quantum of Solace, died at home with his family by his side.

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Let me stop you there: why do Oscar speeches get cut short?

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Even finally winning the most prestigious award in your field can’t stop you from being drowned out by pesky time-keepers

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

Winning an Oscar is the highlight of a career. It’s peer validation on the largest possible stage. As your name is called and you approach the podium, your heart bursts and your head spins. You look out and see every famous person on Earth, all staring straight at you. Beyond them, cameras are beaming your face into hundreds of millions of homes. Time to gather your thoughts and articulate exactly what this means to you.

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Damson Idris: ‘Mum would dress me in a three-piece golden suit’

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Peckham-born Damson Idris is a huge name in the US. But back here his star is still rising. He talks to Tim Lewis about breaking out in Snowfall, his American accent, joking with Jay-Z and the joy of dressing up

In 2015, when he was a young actor from Peckham with a couple of theatre credits and, naturally, an episode of Casualty to his Equity card, Damson Idris somehow wangled a big TV audition in Los Angeles. The part was Franklin Saint, a bright kid in South Central LA during the 1980s who becomes a drug kingpin just as the city is on the cusp of a crack cocaine epidemic. Snowfall was the vision of John Singleton, the director of the seminal 1991 coming-of-age film Boyz n the Hood. Word was that every tyro black actor in America, and beyond, wanted to be cast as Franklin.

“The audition was about two, three weeks out,” recalls Idris, “so I went to my family and said, ‘Guys, I’m going to be in an American accent for three weeks and onwards if this process keeps going on. Don’t, don’t, don’t make no jokes. Don’t ask me, “Ahhhh, why are you talking like that?” No. My name’s Franklin and from now on you’re going to address me as Franklin. You hear that Mum?’ I was still living with my mum at the time. And she’s like, ‘Yeah, whatever. Go wash the dishes.’”

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How Leslie Jordan made it big: ‘If you want to get sober, try 27 days in county jail’

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After starring in Will & Grace and American Horror Story, his life took a twist in lockdown and he became an Instagram superstar at 65. He discusses fame, fun and sharing a cell with Robert Downey Jr

For a man of such diminutive stature – 4ft 11in in shoes – Leslie Jordan loves a tall tale. A cursory question at the start of our interview about where he is calling from, for example, results in this glorious flight of fancy: “I got on a bus in 1982, from the hills of Tennessee. I had $1,200 sewn into my underpants by my mother and I arrived in LA and found West Hollywood, which is where I currently live.”

Such vivid storytelling – delivered in a honey-thick southern drawl, accentuated perfectly by a knowing campness – is part of the reason for Jordan’s unexpected career boost at 65. A jobbing actor best known for his role in American Horror Story and his Emmy-winning turn as Beverly Leslie, the acid-tongued rival of Megan Mullally’s Karen in Will & Grace, Jordan spent most of 2020 becoming an accidental internet sensation, racking up 5.6 million Instagram followers – including the likes of Rihanna and Lily Allen – thanks to his charmingly chaotic videos.

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Steve Guttenberg: ‘I learned humility from Laurence Olivier’

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As the ordinary guy in Police Academy and Three Men and a Baby, Guttenberg was one of the 80s unlikeliest stars – then disappeared. He talks about defying audience expectation, partying with Tom Selleck and Ted Danson and his latest role as a foul-mouthed British gangster

“Steve Guttenberg … in a British gangster film!” sounds like a movie pitch by Alan Partridge. Mr Nice of 80s movies – the actor who embodied friendly normality in films such as Short Circuit, Cocoon and Three Men and a Baby – starring in a weird subgenre of film that is now little more than violence porn and misogyny?

And yet, here we are in 2021, with Guttenberg playing an alarmingly bewigged capo in something called – let me check my notes – Original Gangster. It’s not quite as weird as Donald Trump becoming president of the United States, but it’s not far off.

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‘They cut the beheading scene’: The Long Good Friday, remembered by Helen Mirren and co-stars

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Prophetic, frenetic and shockingly brutal, the film became a British classic. For its 40th anniversary, Mirren and other cast members relive their roles in the menacing gangland masterpiece

It has been 40 years since the release of The Long Good Friday, a gangster film still revered as one of the best British movies of all time. Shot in London in the late 1970s and starring the late Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren, it told the story of an underworld boss trying desperately to stop the IRA from dismantling his empire.

The backdrop for the film was the London Docklands, then mostly undeveloped. With corrupt city planners in his pocket, Hoskins’ character – the pugnacious, barrel-chested Harold Shand – attempts to woo the New York mafia into a partnership to transform the area, selling the idea to them with a speech during a trip up the Thames on his yacht. “Our country is not an island any more,” he snarls. “We’re a leading European state. And I believe this is the decade in which London will become Europe’s capital … no other city in the world has got, right at its centre, such an opportunity for profitable progress.”

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‘Rehab made me grateful to be alive’: Margaret Cho on sobriety, solitude and Stop Asian Hate

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One of the world’s most outrageous comedians, Cho is helping to lead the battle to end racism against Asian-Americans. She discusses hatred, hope and how humour saved her life

● Warning: this article contains discussion of suicide from the start

The thing about being a standup comedian is that you can never turn off that part of your brain, not even when you are trying to kill yourself. Margaret Cho learned this in 2013 when she attempted suicide in a hotel room, using a shower curtain rail. “It started bending and I was like: Oh shit, I’m too fat to kill myself, so I had to get down,” says Cho. “I thought: I’ll go on a diet and I’ll try again when I reach my goal weight, which means I’m never going to kill myself, because I’ll never reach my goal weight.”

The 52-year-old Emmy-, Grammy- and Oscar-nominated comedian, author, actor and podcaster lets out a delighted cackle. “That joke … people get really upset. They’re like: ‘You should put in a trigger warning.’ I don’t know how to do a trigger warning!” The point Cho is trying to make is a serious one. “My sense of humour probably saved me from dying,” she says. “You can’t really shut that part of you off, because humour is really hope. Humour and laughter is the intake of breath, which is the preservation of the body for the next moment … at your darkest moments; it’s actually the thing that shines the brightest. I’m really grateful for it and I’m really grateful I got to live.”

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Ruby Rose on gender, bullying and breaking free: ‘I had a problem with authority’

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After coming out as a lesbian, aged 12, she suffered a horrendous attack at school. Now a successful actor, she is determined to help those wrestling with their identities

Ruby Rose spent much of her childhood travelling around Australia with her mother, an aspiring artist, trying to make ends meet. They were poor, but they were unstoppable, says Rose. Her mother had sold their TV, so there were no dreams of becoming the Hollywood action star she is now, nor the model, presenter, DJ, VJ and campaigner she has been over the years. When Rose was a child, she just wanted to write.

“I wanted to write a book for kids that were my age. I just wanted to have a way to communicate and speak to kids like me, who didn’t have someone,” she says, over Zoom. “I was just this kid who had no friends, who was super unpopular, got bullied and beaten up at school, and was like: ‘I’m going to be a famous writer.’”

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How Millie Bobby Brown used her superpowers

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The Stranger Things star is still in her teens, but has moved beyond new kid on the block to be a Hollywood power broker

It was clearly a moment designed to perplex. Fans of the hit Netflix show Stranger Things were left speculating at the end of season three as to how and why Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, had suddenly lost her supernatural power to move things around with her mind.

Theories have ricocheted across social media during the long wait for the return of the show. But Brown, an English actress who is only 17, has already made such an impact with her Stranger Things role that this spring the question seems something of a side issue, even among her many devotees.

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Julia Ormond: ‘What do I dislike about my appearance? That my career is dependent on it’

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The actor on her love of dogs, granting wishes and Ryan Gosling

Born in Surrey, Julia Ormond, 56, starred in Peter Greenaway’s 1993 film The Baby Of Mâcon. She went on to appear in Legends Of The Fall, First Knight and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button; her latest film, Reunion, is available on digital platforms. She has a daughter and lives in Malibu, California.

What is your greatest fear?
Heights.

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Jessica Walter, star of Arrested Development, dies aged 80

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The Emmy-winning actor, who also starred in Play Misty For Me and Grand Prix, died at her home in New York

Actor Jessica Walter has died at the age of 80.

Walter, best known for her Emmy-winning role as Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development, died in her sleep at her New York home.

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Is the devil really Prada? An uneasy history of fashion as cinema’s punchbag

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Slaxx, a new indie horror-satire about a pair of murderous jeans, is the latest film to turn fashion into a baddie. The Guardian’s film critic thinks it is time to change the story

Which professions get a bad press in the movies? TV executives tend to be portrayhed as manipulative and sociopathic. Journalists can be boozy and lazy (although sometimes they’re dishy investigative idealists, like Woodward and Bernstein). Nightclub owners are awful. Dentists are creepy. Hotel receptionists are sinister.

But if there’s one trade that’s somehow perennially getting it in the neck on screen, it’s fashion. The new horror movie from Canadian satirist Elza Kephart – Slaxx – is a case in point, showing a new brand of jeans, unveiled to an elite audience of hipsters at a haughty upmarket store, becoming possessed by the spirits of exploited workers from the developing world who made them. The jeans run violently amok, slaughtering fashion vloggers and Instagram influencers in showers of blood.

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Covid curfew and clock change threaten to call time on Spain’s drive-in cinemas

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Country’s oldest autocine is calling for exemption from 10pm rule so it can survive summer’s later sunsets

At 7.30 on Friday evening, Godzilla and King Kong are scheduled to converge on a large lot in eastern Spain to trade blows and bellows, rip fistfuls of fur and scales off each other and generally wreak CGI havoc for an appreciative, car-bound audience.

Their titanic sparring, however, could be short-lived. This weekend, the wading reptilian metaphor for atomic warfare and the conflicted, skyscraper-bothering ape could find themselves cowed by the setting sun, the changing of the clocks and the local coronavirus curfew.

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Oscars ‘no Zoom’ policy proving a headache for overseas nominees

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Publicists and studio executives have reportedly complained about logistics, costs and quarantine issues

The “no Zoom” policy for this year’s Oscars ceremony is proving a headache for multiple nominees who live outside the United States and who are still under pandemic restrictions, according to Hollywood publications.

Variety and Deadline Hollywood reported on Wednesday that publicists and some studio executives have complained to the film academy about logistics, costs and quarantine issues raised by the decision to bar nominees from taking part in the ceremony remotely.

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Nobody review – Bob Odenkirk betters John Wick in fun action caper

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The Better Call Saul star gets a furiously entertaining star vehicle playing a suburban father who finds himself up against the Russian mob

For any vaguely fit actor over the age of 50, being given your own Taken was briefly seen as an enviable career boost, a chance to relive former glories, a slickly choreographed leap from an early Hollywood grave back to the sandlot. Ever since Liam Neeson swapped emoting for punching back in 2008, Kevin Costner, Sean Penn, John Travolta, Pierce Brosnan and Guy Pearce all tried to do the same but audiences wisely stayed away from their sub-par shoot-em-ups and execs were forced to realise that, duh, it’s the star rather than the sub-genre that people are magnetically drawn to. Because Neeson’s shtick was continuing to bring in solid crowds while his peers were flailing and in 2014, Keanu Reeves found a similar sweet spot with John Wick, kicking off a hugely profitable new series with a Taken-adjacent combination of simple action plot and much-loved actor.

Related: Chaos Walking review – cursed YA adaptation stumbles into view

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‘What appointments did these dogs have to keep?’: long lunches and brief liaisons in a radical new dogumentary

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To mark National Puppy Day, Elizabeth Lo’s acclaimed film Stray gives humans rare insight into the canine gaze, courtesy of homeless mutts in Istanbul

From the moment Zeytin makes her first appearance in Elizabeth Lo’s feature Stray, there is no doubt you are in the presence of a unique spirit. As she surveys an Istanbul side street at dawn, her features are alert, her gaze is uncompromising and her deep, dark eyes sparkle with intelligence. There’s something of Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen about her, or maybe Brad Pitt in one of his less kempt moments. But non-dog comparisons don’t do her justice. This is one indomitable bitch.

Lo first encountered Zeytin and her friend Nazar on a 2017 casting trip to Turkey, and knew immediately that she had found the star she was looking for – which is to say, a dog who could carry a human film. “We were wandering through a busy underground tunnel filled with people when suddenly these two giant stray dogs streaked past us,” she says. “They were running with such a sense of purpose and it was so intriguing. What appointments did these dogs have to keep?”

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‘Wife No 5 is the last’: Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd on love and life

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In 1984, Lloyd was playing a Klingon in Star Trek; today he’s William Shatner’s friend in the romcom Senior Moment. Soon, he will be King Lear. Is there a logic to his apparently chaotic career?

It seems appropriate for a man whose most famous role had him struggling with the nature of time that Christopher Lloyd arrives for our interview half an hour late and somewhat flustered. He had been under the impression it was happening the next day. Back to the Future indeed. But Lloyd soon gathers himself, flashing Doc Brown’s trademark wicked grin.

Sadly, the problems don’t stop there – Zoom is playing havoc with his hearing aid, so we have to rely on the skill and patience of his wife, Lisa, to pass on all questions. Which brings us neatly to the reason for our chat – his new film, Senior Moment, in which he stars with Jean Smart and William Shatner, who play a pair of older star-crossed lovers in this decidedly old-school romcom. “I enjoy playing characters of the age that I have now,” says Lloyd, 82. “I mean, they’re just as interesting as younger characters.” Indeed, Lloyd has been playing them for some time – it’s hard to believe he was only 47 when he starred in Back to the Future. “I haven’t been cast as an elderly lover yet, though,” he laughs. Instead, he’s playing Shatner’s best friend.

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‘We needed to rescue the nation from despair’: culture’s year of Covid

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Comedians went virtual, Ai Weiwei went to Portugal – and Bake Off pledged the show would go on. In the first of a two-part series, cultural figures look back on a year that shook their industry

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‘I have picked people up on the street’: the secret life of architect Alvar Aalto

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He built wild, magical buildings and furniture that is still thrilling today. But a new film suggests the celebrated Finn was also a domineering philanderer deeply indebted to his talented wives

Wonky lumps of misshapen, scorched bricks burst from a block of student flats in Cambridge, Massachusetts, giving a warty look to the long wall that winds its way along the Charles River. “The lousiest bricks in the world,” is how Finnish architect Alvar Aalto described the local New England materials he used for his Baker House dorms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1947. It was meant as a compliment – he loved their twisted, blackened, brutish texture, which gave the walls the look of coarse tweed.

The pockmarked wall is one of many such strange and beautiful things covered in a new feature-length documentary film about Aalto, Finland’s most famous designer export and one of the most celebrated architects of the 20th century, who built a career on his obsessive attention to material details. Always thinking about the human experience of moving through a building, he considered everything from the feel of a leather-wrapped door handle to the pleasure of a misshapen brick.

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