Category Archives: Film

‘Weird is good’: Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen on superhero sitcom WandaVision

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She’s a chaos magician. He’s a density-changing synthezoid. Are Scarlet Witch and Vision really classic sitcom material? The stars of Marvel’s foray into TV reveal how it all came about

Marvel’s 2020 should have gone much differently. Its Black Widow movie and The Eternals should both have been released last year, with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings imminent. But the pandemic struck and now all three have been booted into the middle distance. And so it has now been 18 months since we last heard from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, when Avengers Endgame became the highest-grossing movie ever. And in that vacuum, the question of what happens next has only grown more intense. But the answer might not be what anybody expected. Marvel is about to break its silence with WandaVision – and it’s a huge departure. Not only is it the first TV show produced by Marvel Studios, it is also presented in the form of a half-hour sitcom. It is no exaggeration to call WandaVision the weirdest thing Marvel has ever done.

“Weird is good,” says Marvel Studio president Kevin Feige from beneath his trademark baseball cap. “I like weird. After Endgame, after the completion of a 23-movie Infinity Saga, we were soul-searching about what was coming next. WandaVision being our first for Disney+ is perfect. It was always about pushing the boundaries of storytelling, doing something we could only do with the narrative structure of television.”

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‘The humanity of black characters is often forgotten’: behind Oscar-tipped One Night in Miami

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In an acclaimed new film, the story of a night between four major figures – Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali – is brought to life

One thing is certain: vanilla ice cream was eaten. The rest? If only we knew.

The year is 1964 and activist Malcolm X, singer-songwriter Sam Cooke and American football player Jim Brown gather in Miami, Florida, to cheer boxer Muhammad Ali – then Cassius Clay – to his first world heavyweight championship. No celebration is planned because he was not expected to win, so the four repair to Malcolm’s hotel room in the segregated African American part of town.

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‘Untouchable’ Bollywood poster provokes outrage over caste stereotypes

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Upper-caste actor playing Dalit politician Mayawati shown dishevelled and holding broom in publicity for new film

A picture of a woman holding a broom. Anywhere else, the image might pass unnoticed. But in India the poster for the film Madam Chief Minister, loosely based on the life of politician Mayawati, who is a Dalit, has triggered uproar for perpetuating caste stereotypes.

Bollywood actor Richa Chadha, who plays Mayawati, tweeted an image of the poster ahead of the film’s release later this month. She is shown looking dishevelled and holding the kind of large broom used by municipal roadsweepers. The tagline of the poster reads: Untouchable, Unstoppable.

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Daniel review – terrifying tale of an Isis captive

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The family of a photojournalist held in Syria must raise a multimillion-dollar ransom after the Danish government refuses to negotiate

Over the last couple of decades, Danish cinema has increasingly proved to have a strong aptitude for emotive, nuanced drama and intelligent engagement, particularly through documentary-making, with conflicts abroad. This inspired-by-a-true-story feature, from journeyman director Niels Arden Oplev (who helmed the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo film) skilfully combines those two strands to tell the story of Daniel Rye, a young Danish photographer who was captured by Isis in Syria in 2013.

Filmed in a wiggly, handheld fashion – such a signature of the Dogma 95 years it almost feels like a retro affectation – the plot tracks methodically through Daniel’s story, holding tight on the expressive face of Esben Smed, who rises to the physical challenges of the role. For starters, he has to convincingly pass as Rye when he was young enough to be a contender for the Danish gymnastics team, although presumably a stuntman performed most of the acrobatics we see.

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Franka Potente: How we made Run Lola Run

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‘I had to sprint across Berlin in a pair of Dr Marten boots – and I was smoking two packs a day back then’

I was in New York shooting a couple of films when I got this script called Lola Rennt (Lola Runs). I read it and thought: “This is cool – but kind of weird, too.” I flew back to Berlin, met the writer-director Tom Tykwer, and realised the energy I had felt on the page came from him.

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Sex and the City to return for new series, stars confirm

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The rebooted show will be called And Just Like That... and will feature the original stars, apart from Kim Cattrall

Sex and the City will be given a 2021 makeover, US streaming service HBO Max has announced.

Long-swirling rumours that the video-on-demand arm of the prestige TV brand was considering commissioning a revival of the 90s and 00s show were confirmed on Sunday night US time when three of the four stars of the original show, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis, shared a trailer for the series on social media platforms.

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Call My Agent’s Camille Cottin: ‘Don’t we need culture more than we need shopping?’

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The scene-stealing star of the French comedy series - a word-of-mouth Netflix hit - on her journey from a prank show in Paris to co-stardom with Matt Damon

“I bought a few sheep during lockdown. Nobody told me they’d eat all my plants. How Parisian is that?” I’m discussing the pandemic with actor Camille Cottin, who during the first Covid lockdown last year decamped from her apartment in the French capital to do up an old farmhouse in Normandy. Now, she’s back in Paris, preparing for what will be a huge year. Already a star in her native France, Cottin is making the leap to major Hollywood roles. Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater, in which she co-stars with Matt Damon, is due for release in the autumn. She is currently polishing her English for her role in Ridley Scott’s Gucci biopic, which starts shooting in a few months and features Adam Driver as Maurizio Gucci and Lady Gaga his ex-wife. And she has just signed up for a huge project that she’s not yet allowed to talk about.

Before all that comes the fourth and final season on Netflix later this month of Call My Agent!, the word-of-mouth hit drama that has found new fans looking to binge during lockdown. As Andréa – tough, ruthless, gay, and agent to some of France’s biggest movie stars – Cottin’s is the standout role in a show that has brought her international attention, including a role in series three of Killing Eve.

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Michael Apted: a vital and dignified director who understood how class shapes us all

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Apted made his name with the brilliant Up TV series that examined people’s lives every seven years, before going on to become a film-maker of distinction, whose influence cannot be overstated

Michael Apted, who has died aged 79, was a British movie director who – like Ken Loach and Ken Russell – earned his stripes working on TV. But it was his destiny to help create an epic ongoing masterpiece for the small screen with truly cinematic scope and beyond: current-affairs television which had the scale of cinema, combined with the Mass Observation Project and the Roman census.

Granada Television’s Seven Up! from 1964, was, to quote a comedy of the era, not so much a programme, more a way of life. It took 14 British children at the Jesuit age of seven (that is, the age at which the Jesuits’ St Ignatius of Loyola famously said he could “show you the man” if schooled early enough) and interviewed them about their lives and opinions – seven from a working-class background and seven from a posher caste. Then it was updated every seven years, finally spanning 56 years.

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Michael Apted, director and Seven Up documentarian, dies at 79

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British director made films Coal Miner’s Daughter and The World is Not Enough, and the long-running Up documentary series

The British director Michael Apted has died at the age of 79.

The film-maker and documentarian was known for films such as Gorillas in the Mist and Coal Miner’s Daughter, as well as his long-running series of Up documentaries.

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The director who dared to suggest Jewish men don’t need rescuing by blond women

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The late film-maker Joan Micklin Silver exploded the cliches of modern romances. If only others would do the same

The director Joan Micklin Silver, who died last week, was – to use the kind of cliche she abhorred – a pioneer. She was a female director at a time when studio executives were more than comfortable with being openly sexist, telling Silver: “Women directors are one more problem we don’t need.”

She made distinctly Jewish movies, as opposed to the kind of Jewish-lite movies that were – and are still – Hollywood’s more usual style. Her two greatest films, Hester Street (1975), about a Jewish immigrant couple (Steven Keats and Carol Kane) on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, and the peerless 1988 romcom Crossing Delancey, about a modern young woman (Amy Irving) who is reluctantly fixed up with a pickle seller (Peter Riegert), are to When Harry Met Sally what the Netflix series Shtisel is to Seinfeld: Jewish as opposed to merely Jew-ish.

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James Cromwell: ‘My father told me: “Don’t be an actor, you’re too damn tall”‘

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The 80-year-old actor and activist recalls being raised among film royalty, avoiding the draft for Vietnam, and his losing streak at tennis tournaments

I was born in 1940 and went to an American prep school, The Hill School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 50s. It was all white boys: no people of colour, no Hispanics, no Chinese, and it was all very organised and bound in tradition. Other kids brought records to school by people such as Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. To me, they seemed like stylised crooners singing about some fake emotion and I found them quite boring. I later grew very fond of Tony Bennett, but at that time he didn’t seem to project that wonderful persona through his music.

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Why Mr Bean and Borat are ready to retire

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Rowan Atkinson and Sacha Baron Cohen are killing off two of comedy’s most indelible characters. They’ve picked the perfect time

Nothing lasts for ever. In time the trees will wither, the seas will boil and the mountains will crumble to dust. And nothing reinforces the ephemeral cruelty of the universe like the news that Rowan Atkinson doesn’t want to be Mr Bean any more.

In an interview with the Radio Times this week, Atkinson said of Mr Bean: “I don’t much enjoy playing him. The weight of responsibility is not pleasant. I find it stressful and exhausting, and I look forward to the end of it.” And that’s fair enough; Mr Bean has now been a going concern for 31 years, and has taken the form of a television programme, two films, an animated series, a sketch performed for the Olympics nine years ago and – slightly improbably – four books.

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This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection review – an uncompromising tale of resistance

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Mary Twala gives an intimate yet epic performance as an 80-year-old widow fighting plans for dam that will obliterate her village in Lesotho

This is an extraordinary and otherworldly feature film from the tiny landlocked kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa. It is the tale of a rebel spirit: an elderly woman who opposes government plans to flood her village, making way for a dam. It’s a film about resistance and resilience, but director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is coolly unsentimental and realistic about the inevitable march of capitalism and construction. Weaving in ideas around displacement, collective identity and history, this film takes on almost mythic qualities.

Related: From Beyoncé to the Oscars: Mary Twala, Africa's queen of cinema

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How Promising Young Woman shows the limits of #MeToo revenge

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The tart Oscar-tipped dark comedy offers an intoxicating revenge plot against bad men. But can insight be found in assuming everyone’s worst potential?

Promising Young Woman, writer/director Emerald Fennell’s acidic dark comedy which coats an incendiary rape revenge plot with a pastel sheen, runs an alluring, looping trap: Cassie, a singularly obsessed character played with singularly impressive depth by Carey Mulligan, pretends to be near-passed-out drunk at a bar, plays along to a skeevy man’s predatory machinations, then flips the switch when he begins to sexually assault a woman he believes is too drunk to notice or care. “What are you doing?” she asks, suddenly stone-cold sober. The first time Cassie pulls the trap, in the film’s first sequence, it’s not quite shocking – if you’ve seen the trailer, you know her revenge scheme – but given that it’s The OC heartthrob Adam Brody as the aw-shucks predator, Mulligan’s archly calibrated facade drop is an enticing and unnerving jolt.

Related: Promising Young Woman review – Carey Mulligan ignites fiery #MeToo revenge tale

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Emma Mackey: ‘You’d have to be a sociopath to want to be a celebrity’

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The Sex Education star on the perils of social media, playing Emily Brontë, and her new Disney whodunnit with French and Saunders

When the trailer came out, it felt really Hollywood, which makes me laugh. I was like: ‘Ah, OK. This is quite a big deal.’” Emma Mackey spent the last few months of 2019 filming Death on the Nile, the second of Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot adaptations. It’s a big-budget, big-name Disney extravaganza, and for Mackey, who turns 25 on Monday, it marks a first dip into blockbuster waters.

“I’d never really had that experience of walking into a studio before, where the sets were all built, and the costumes were tailored to my body, and I had a wig, and it was just … ” She trails off, lost for words. “I clearly can’t talk about it!” she says, laughing. “It completely blows my mind, still.” She does an impression of a 1930s ingenue. “‘It felt like a movie! A proper movie!’ Which is a good sign, I guess.”

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Cinema legend Ellen Burstyn: ‘It was never my intention to be a movie star’

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As she prepares to smash an Oscar record, the great actor talks about drawing on her own suffering, missing her violent mother – and surviving the Hollywood ‘hamburger machine’

Ellen Burstyn is struggling to make herself heard above the sirens that are screeching across the city. “I live on a road that’s very popular with police cars and ambulances,” she says down the line from New York. She had been trying to tell me about the Oscars when she was interrupted by the racket. If she is nominated in March – and, with the odds of her winning best supporting actress currently at 5/1, she almost certainly will be – this would make her the Academy’s oldest acting nominee, having turned 88 this month. “At the moment, it’s Chris Plummer,” she says excitedly. “But I would beat him by 42 days! What a great crown that would be to wear.”

If her performance in the Netflix drama Pieces of a Woman wins her a nomination, it will be her seventh. Over the last 50 years, Burstyn has been recognised for her portrayals of a jaded wife in The Last Picture Show; of a mother whose child is demonically possessed in The Exorcist; and of a widowed waitress who hits the road with her young son in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. In Same Time, Next Year, she played a married woman who meets annually with her lover; in Resurrection she was a car crash survivor who acquires healing powers; and in Requiem for a Dream she starred as the mother of a junkie who becomes an addict herself.

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21 things to look forward to in 2021 – from meteor showers to the Olympics

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From finally seeing the back of Donald Trump to being in a football stadium – the new year is full of promise

You probably found a few things to enjoy about last year: you rediscovered your bicycle, perhaps, or your family, or even both, and learned to love trees. And don’t forget the clapping. Plus some brilliant scientists figured out how to make a safe and effective vaccine for a brand new virus in record time.

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Tanya Roberts’ publicist retracts report that said actor had died

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The former Bond girl was mistakenly reported dead after being hospitalised following a fall at her home

Tanya Roberts, who played Roger Moore’s love interest in A View to a Kill and later starred in the sitcom That ‘70s Show as Midge Pinciotti, has been hospitalised after falling at her home.

Her publicist, Mike Pingel, mistakenly reported the 65-year-old dead on Monday, leading multiple outlets, including the Guardian, to publish stories saying she had died. Pingel later told the Associated Press that Roberts was still alive as of 10am in California but was in a poor condition.

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Sci-fi movies leave me empty. Isn’t the real world dramatic enough? | Prove me wrong

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Science fiction is just a bunch of loud noises, special effects and unbelievable plotlines, argues Alison Rourke. Shelley Hepworth tries to prove her wrong

Alison: Shelley, I think sci-fi movies are a waste of time. If I’m going to spend a couple of hours watching something, I want the characters, and how they relate to each other, to be the hero of the story. When I watch sci-fi, it seems like the machines, the special effects and the fantasy are the main point of the film. I know for some people that’s about escapism, but how can it provide an escape if what’s on screen is fundamentally unattainable in real life?

Sorry, but it just leaves me empty. Prove me wrong, Shelley.

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Robin Williams’s widow: ‘There were so many misunderstandings about what had happened to him’

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Susan Schneider Williams watched her husband suffer with undiagnosed Lewy body dementia before he killed himself in 2014. Her new film tries to educate others about the condition – and put to rest assumptions about his death

After Robin Williams died in August 2014, aged 63, a lot of people had a lot of things to say about him. There was the predictable speculation about why a hugely beloved and seemingly healthy Hollywood star would end his own life, with some confidently stating that he was depressed or had succumbed to old addictions.

Others talked, with more evidence, about Williams as a comic genius (Mork & Mindy, Mrs Doubtfire, The Birdcage, Aladdin); a brilliant dramatic actor (Dead Poets Society, Awakenings, Good Will Hunting, One Hour Photo); and both (Good Morning, Vietnam; The Fisher King). One thing everyone agreed on was that he had an extraordinary mind. Comedians spoke about how no one thought faster on stage than Williams; those who made movies with him said he never did the same take twice, always ad-libbing and getting funnier each time.

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