Category Archives: Film

DMX obituary

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Rap star and actor who embodied the edgy and lawless life depicted in his work

The first rapper to have his first five albums go straight to the top of the US chart, DMX, who has died aged 50 following a heart attack, established himself as the premier exponent of hardcore rap in the aftermath of the violent deaths of the Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur. He announced himself with his multi-platinum-selling debut album It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998), a stormy survey of greed, violence, crime and betrayal, which also displayed his gift for blending light and heavy textures behind an intense, menacing presence at the microphone.

Before the end of that year DMX had released his second blockbuster, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, another huge seller. He was suddenly the new king of Planet Rap, yet when the 1999 Grammy award nominations came around he was nowhere to be seen. This omission prompted the rap superstar Jay-Z (who would win the best rap album Grammy that year) to boycott the awards ceremony “because too many major rap artists continue to be overlooked”, as he put it. “Rappers deserve more attention from the Grammy committee and from the whole world.”

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The Howling at 40: a horror movie that gave us something to chew on

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Joe Dante’s sly and smart breakout, about a reporter uncovering a colony of werewolves, was a fun ride that had space for satire

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …”

So begins Allen Ginsberg’s radical poem Howl, which upon close study has absolutely nothing to do with werewolves. And yet it appears on a reporter’s desk in Joe Dante’s horror classic The Howling, one among many blink-or-you’ll-miss it visual jokes that Dante tucks into the movie, like a small-town sheriff scarfing down a can of Wolf-brand chili or an old Little Boy Blue cartoon featuring the Big Bad Wolf that’s airing on TV. His best films are loaded with such peripheral delights, which have the feel of inside jokes, but mostly point to the movie-crazy spirit of a Dante production. The more movies you’ve seen, the more you tend to love Joe Dante.

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‘It’s an utter myth’: how Nomadland exposes the cult of the western

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From cowboys to ‘van-dwellers’, itinerant Americans are often portrayed as heroic lone wolves. Chloé Zhao’s film shows that the truth is more complicated and less glamorous

It has been a wild ride for Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s roving portrait of the US’s rootless modern migrants. Shot for $5m and largely featuring amateur actors, it is the little movie that could: this year’s rags-to-riches story, beloved by the critics and odds-setters alike. The road has been cleared, the gold rush is on, but the Hollywood happy ending feels at odds with the film. As Nomadland steers its westerly course – from the Baftas in London to the Oscars in Los Angeles – it is living a dream that it knows is a lie.

Condé Nast Traveler called it “a love letter to America’s wide open spaces”, which is true up to a point, but this ignores the pathos, poverty and desperation at its core. Adapted from Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction bestseller, the film bounces Frances McDormand’s hard-bitten loner through a modern American badland in which the saloon and the sheriff’s office have been replaced by the RV park and the Amazon warehouse. I would file the film as an anti-western, a wholesale repudiation of manifest destiny, the pursuit of happiness, all the Hollywood snake oil we have long been fed. “Yeah, OK,” Bruder says. “But it’s more complicated than that.” Frustratingly, I think she may be right.

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Anthony Hopkins’ 20 best film performances – ranked!

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Anthony Hopkins has been nominated for a Bafta and an Oscar for his role in The Father. But how does it compare with his performances as Hannibal Lecter, CS Lewis, Odin and an ageing Zorro?

Over the years, Anthony Hopkins acquired the sort of gravitas that allowed him to slot effortlessly into his stint in the Marvel special effects salt mines, nowadays a rite-of-passage for every actor. And he is perfectly cast as Odin, the one-eyed ruler of Asgard, legendary know-it-all and, in the MCU at least, the father of Hela, Thor and Loki. “I’m a little like Odin myself,” Hopkins said in an interview.

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Night in Paradise review – operatic Korean display of gunfire and death

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This blood-splattered gangster flick with a romantic subplot follows Tae-Gu as he hides out from his enemies

This gleefully blood-splattered Korean gangster film with an unlikely romantic subplot looks for most of its running time like the sort of cult-friendly genre discovery one could watch and then crow over before an inevitable Hollywood remake comes out. That said, the ending is so relentlessly bleak that a faithful remake would be unlikely – while an unfaithful one with a happier conclusion would be absurd given the ruthless logic of writer-director Park Hoon-jung’s plotting.

The initiating setup is that after something really bad happens, moody pretty-boy gangster Tae-Gu (Eom Tae-goo) must hide out on a resort island in off-season before he is ultimately resettled in Vladivostok, Russia. En route he stays with a grumpy arms dealer, a former gangster himself, and that man’s troubled, taciturn niece Jae-Yeon (Jeon Yeo-been). But it soon transpires that there’s hidden depths in both Jae-Yeon and Tae-Gu, who after the de rigueur initial verbal sparring become unlikely friends – and maybe potential soul mates, especially when they end up bonding over their shared affection for mulhoe, a spicy raw fish soup which plays a significant role in the story. In fact, there are a lot of meals throughout, discussions of who is hungry and a key plot-furthering sit-down among gangsters in a restaurant that involves one of those huge rotating trivets typical of Korean restaurants so that people can share dishes more easily.

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Elizabeth Perkins on luck, sexism and Big’s love scene: ‘It would not be acceptable today’

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The star of hit films in the 80s and 90s has since moved into TV. She discusses life with 10 siblings, #MeToo and why she couldn’t ask for a better life

Veering from horror to joy and back again, Elizabeth Perkins is contemplating what it would be like if her adult children moved back home. “The thing is, you miss them so much, then they’ll come back for a holiday and within a week there’s dirty dishes everywhere, there’s wet towels on the floor, they’ve eaten all the food. After a couple of weeks, you’re like: ‘Will they ever leave?’”

This is the timely theme of Perkins’ show The Moodys, the first season of which, in 2019, saw three grownup children return home to Chicago for Christmas. Perkins plays Ann Moody, their mother; Denis Leary plays her husband. In the new season, all three children are living at the family home, with predictably messy consequences. “It really explored that dichotomy of: you love them to death, but, man, they get on your nerves,” says Perkins.

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‘Film-making? Bring it on!’: ex-stockbroker Farah Nabulsi on her Oscar nomination

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The British Palestinian is up for an Oscar with her debut, filmed at a notorious Israeli flashpoint called Checkpoint 300. The London-based director talks about her shocking visits to the Middle East

Farah Nabulsi was at home in west London when she found out her film The Present had been nominated for the Oscar for best live action short. She’d persuaded her teenage sons to stay home and watch the announcement. When she heard her name, she jumped up on the table. Her eldest looked at her as if she’d gone mad. He’d got it into his head that this was the actual ceremony and she had lost. “He was like, ‘Why are you so happy? They didn’t pick you.’ He killed the moment.”

The film is Nabulsi’s directing debut, a powerful 20-minute piece of humanist cinema about a Palestinian man, Yusef (Saleh Bakri), who wants to surprise his wife with a fridge as an anniversary gift. He takes the couple’s young daughter, Yasmine (Mariam Kanj), shopping. But their big day out is ruined by two encounters with Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. Yasmine is a witness to her dad’s humiliation – she tugs on his sleeve, reminding him to bite his tongue, to swallow the soldiers’ insults. It is a study of injustice that – like the best shorts – doesn’t try to cram too much in.

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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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