Baldwin accuses critics of ‘misrepresenting’ her, and addresses her background and that cucumber ‘brain fart’ incident
Hilaria Baldwin has accused critics of “misrepresenting” her amid allegations she spent years faking being Spanish.
Speaking out in a New York Times interview on Wednesday, Baldwin addressed the controversy surrounding her heritage after it emerged she was born in Boston, not Spain, and was originally named Hillary.
Continue reading...Ramallah’s leader Musa Hadid navigates diplomatic stresses and day-to-day problems in this love letter to the West Bank
Musa Hadid is the popular Palestinian mayor of Ramallah in the West Bank, and this thoughtful, sympathetic documentary tracks his stressful day-to-day working life – shown suddenly getting a lot more stressful in 2017 when President Trump announced his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the US embassy there from Tel Aviv. Hadid feels strongly that this move emboldened Israel’s military to be more menacing in Ramallah, with soldiers marching into stores and demanding to see security camera footage on the grounds that there could be images of terrorists – and even doing the same at city hall.
The film lets you appreciate Hadid’s delicate and complex situation. He is often receiving high-profile international visitors and relishes the opportunity to show off the city he loves – the opening and closing sequences of this film, incidentally, almost feel like the introduction to Woody Allen’s Manhattan. One such VIP is Prince William, though some of Hadid’s colleagues are less than happy: “All the problems of our country come from Britain!” says one, referring to the 1923 Mandate.
Continue reading...Daniel Craig hands in his licence to kill, Frances McDormand delivers her best ever performance, Carey Mulligan unsettles in a rape-revenge drama and Tom Cruise reaches for the skies … this year’s must-see films
Paul Greengrass’s latest film is based on the western novel by Paulette Jiles, about a girl returning to her family in 1860s Texas after being kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe. Helena Zengel plays the girl, Johanna, and Tom Hanks plays the man who must look after her: Captain Kidd, an ex-army veteran who makes a living reading aloud from newspapers to illiterate townsfolk, and who is now in the middle of a very big news story.
• Released in the UK on 1 January
Looking for a more positive new year resolution? From a Shirley Jackson short story to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 30-minute Ted talk, nourish your mind with our one-a-day selection of literary treats
Our revels now are ended and January looms, with its exhortations to get fit, lose weight, dry out. So here’s a radical alternative diet: instead of depriving yourself, how about making it a month of treats – but feeding your brain instead of your face? Our one-a-day calendar will take you into magical realms of poetry and prose, argument and imagination. It will transport you to some places you always wanted to explore, but couldn’t find the time, and to others you never knew existed, where you will find strange and wonderful things.
In fact, this calendar very nearly didn’t happen because I kept disappearing down rabbit-holes so deep and fascinating that, had I been the white rabbit himself, someone would have had to drag me out by the ears. Some entries – such as John Huston’s film of Malcolm Lowry’s mescal-fuelled modernist masterpiece Under the Volcano (20 January) – come with the authority of a full year’s leisurely burrowing (it is among the BFI’s list of 100 great films to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime, which was a comfort and joy through lockdown, and is handily still being updated).
Continue reading...Actors are slowly returning to work after a long shutdown caused vast economic damage: ‘How many people gave up their dreams?’
For decades, the sound stages of Hollywood have built alternate universes in the middle of Los Angeles – fictional courtrooms, hospitals, homes and offices. Today, they all resemble the set of Contagion.
Make-up artists walk around in astronaut helmets. Actors take breaks inside plastic bubbles. And healthcare professionals swab everyone’s nose to test for a deadly infection before they’re allowed inside.
Continue reading...The crisis poses a deadly threat to some sectors and creates opportunities for others. We examine how they will fare in 2021
Coronavirus has changed lives and industries across the UK, accelerating fundamental shifts in behaviour and consumption that were already on their way. Debates about home working, preserving local high streets and the ethics of air travel were bubbling away before coronavirus rampaged across the world, but the consequences of the worst pandemic in more than a century have either settled those arguments or boosted the momentum behind certain lifestyle changes. Here we look at how those debates have been changed – or resolved – by Covid-19.
Continue reading...From producers’ faux pas to an actor’s accident with a chainsaw, check out your knowledge of the movie world
Which James Bond film had its release postponed twice this year due to Covid-19?
Die Another Day
No Time to Die
Live and Let Die
Tomorrow Never Dies
Which actor was picked by Pablo Larraín to play Princess Diana in his upcoming film about the end of her married life?
Lily James
Millie Bobby Brown
Kristen Stewart
Vanessa Kirby
Which prominent couple signed a lucrative deal this year with Netflix to make TV drama, films and children’s shows?
Prince Albert and Princess Charlene of Monaco
Danny Dyer and Joanne Mas
Elton John and David Furnish
Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex
In August, Brian Blessed revealed that the Queen told him her favourite film is one of his. Was it?
Santa’s Blotto (Blessed played Santa)
Henry VIII and His Six Wives (Blessed played the Earl of Suffolk)
Flash Gordon (Blessed played Prince Vultan)
Much Ado About Nothing (Blessed played Antonio)
In the autumn, it was revealed that a baseball film inspired John Lennon to record the song Grow Old With Me a month before he was shot dead in December 1980. Was it?
A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story (1978), with Blythe Danner as Eleanor and Edward Herrmann as her husband, Lou, stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Angels in the Outfield (1951), starring Paul Douglas as the Pittsburgh Pirates’ tough-talking manager Guffy McGovern, who is soothed by love
The Stratton Story (1949), starring James Stewart as Monty Stratton of the Chicago White Sox
The Bad News Bears (1976), with Walter Matthau as the grumpy old coach
This summer, which film festival moved to gender-neutral acting awards?
Cannes
Venice
Sundance
Berlin
In September, US congressman Ken Buck called for an investigation into what?
The Netflix movie Cuties
The Capitol Hill security administration’s decision in April 2015 to allow Buck to bring an AR-15 assault rifle into the building for a photo opportunity in a year in which one child had already been killed and eight injured during school shootings
Twitter allowing Buck in March 2020 to post a video online boasting about the AR-15 assault rifle in his office, challenging Joe Biden to take it from him, in a year in which two children had already been killed and one injured during school shootings
The NRA spending $829,377 on Buck’s congressional campaign in 2010, a year in which three children were killed and five injured during school shootings
This year, Matt Hancock incorrectly referred to “Daniel Rashford” when he meant Marcus Rashford, the footballer whose school meals campaign had just shamed the government into submission. Hancock later said he had been thinking of a famous movie personality. Who was it?
Daniel Radcliffe
Daniel Craig
Daniel Day-Lewis
Daniel who’s travelling tonight on a plane
Which movie star suffered a chainsaw accident at home during lockdown?
Judi Dench
Maggie Smith
Cate Blanchett
Sylvester Stallone
At the beginning of the year, producers of the period drama Little Women were embarrassed when an eagle-eyed fan spotted two modern items in the background of one shot, just behind Timothée Chalamet. Were they?
A green-tea menthol e-cigarette and a tablet
A portable Blu-ray player and an ultrasonic humidifier
A Fitbit and a pair of Apple glasses
A Hydro Flask and a plastic Poland Spring water bottle
10 and above.
Cut! What a glorious take, carissimo. Practise your Zoom acceptance speech my darling because we're talking silverware.
7 and above.
Cut! Whoah! Not bad my love. I was really feeling it that time.
0 and above.
Cut! With a performance this bad, I regret casting you. The security guard will escort you out of the studio.
4 and above.
Cut! Mmm. Try that scene again darling, but do try to say the lines as if you haven't got a head injury.
Continue reading...Dhawan casts his son Varun in the role made famous in 1995 by Govinda, but little effort has been made to acknowledge the quarter-century since
It’s a tale of two Bollywoods this Christmas. Over at Netflix, Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane, representing Indian film’s modernising wing, have engineered the sharp and knowing meta-thriller AK vs AK. Here on Amazon Prime Video meanwhile, you can watch veteran comedy director David Dhawan renew his IP rights on Coolie No 1, previously a hit 1995 vehicle for the Sandwell-born funnyman Govinda. Even the latter’s most devout fans would probably concede the original left room for improvements, but that’s something Dhawan appears unfussed about. This Coolie updates a few reference points and replaces Govinda with latter-day hunk Varun Dhawan – the director’s son – then surrounds him with antiquated players and playing, part of a frenetic attempt to pretend the last 30 years never happened.
The plot – lowly railway porter (Dhawan) is hired to woo a society belle (Sara Ali Khan) as part of a conspiracy to disgrace her family – remains familiar and predictable. The most immediate contrast with the original is a result of the casting. Rather too obviously a handsome, cardio-trained leading man schlubbing down for (not many) easy laughs, Dhawan Jr bounds onscreen with boyish enthusiasm, but trails a lingering note of condescension – and Dhawan Sr was evidently too busy remembering how best to smash his supporting actors in the gonads to direct anyone. Khan, sadly, is stranded on balconies looking fetchingly concerned while the men below determine her character’s destiny. In this, Coolie 2020 really does seem so last century.
Continue reading...From Up’s moving life story to the father-son parting of Onward, the animation powerhouse has never shirked from profound contemplation
There comes a time in the life of a writer, director and, perhaps, a company when the days shorten, the shadows lengthen and contemplating the inevitable must begin. The guy in the cloak with the retro lawn equipment can’t be ignored any longer: Death. In Pixar’s latest film, Soul, mortality springs itself with supreme bad timing on protagonist Joe Gardner, a New York jazzman about to play the gig of his life when he falls down a manhole. After 2017’s Coco and this year’s Onward, this is Pixar’s third film about death in as many years. Is this fixation the Californian animation giant’s midlife crisis in multimillion-dollar CGI form?
Soul, directed by Pete Docter, is a classy offering with smart colouring-book metaphysics in the vein of his 2015 film Inside Out, as Joe attempts to escape the “Great Beyond” and return to his body, via the “Great Before”. This is the realm where nascent souls must find their spark – their animating passion in life – and are then dispatched to Earth. Visually drawing on Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, broaching the dark subject for children with life-affirming insouciance, and – featuring the company’s first black lead character – a big diversity coup, it’s a typically slick, four-quadrant-pleasing, stock price-boosting entertainment package. This is what Pixar do.
Continue reading...From an unusual first kiss to a horrifying shock death, Guardian writers pick their most impactful big screen bits of the year
Spoilers ahead
Continue reading...The star of Years and Years and The Haunting of Bly Manor reflects on coming out as lesbian to her mum, facing racism at drama school and the progress – or not – of the Black Lives Movement
When T’Nia Miller first told her mother that she was dating a woman, she explained to her mum that she wasn’t there to see her have sex with men, so this was no different. “It’s just about me having really good friendships and beauty in my life,” she recalls saying. “That was it. We never had more of a conversation than that. If she had any issues, they were hers to deal with, not mine. She knew that. She’s a very educated, very well-read woman. For her, coming to terms with it was easy.”
The east-London born actor is telling me this story over the phone as she walks her dog (she forgot about the interview and her seven-month-old pomeranian, Dilhi, needed his daily steps) because she’s taking part in the #YoungerMe campaign, an initiative by the LGBTQ+ young persons organisation Just Like Us, which asks how LGBTQ+ inclusive education would have helped older queer people when they were in school.
Continue reading...Jeremy Bulloch, who has died aged 75, was a busy character actor who staked a claim for cinematic immortality by playing the inscrutable Boba Fett in the Star Wars films. A masked, enigmatic bounty hunter with a jet pack and distinctive costume design, Boba Fett debuted in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), capturing and carbon-freezing Han Solo (Harrison Ford) in order to convey him to the slug-like paymaster Jabba the Hutt.
Despite relatively limited screen time and dialogue (his few lines were post-dubbed by the American actor Jason Wingreen), both Bulloch and Boba Fett became much loved contributors to the franchise and he reprised the role in Return of the Jedi (1983). In the eventual Star Wars prequels Boba Fett was played by the child actor Daniel Logan, and so Bulloch was instead hired to play the spaceship pilot Captain Colton in the third of them, Revenge of the Sith (2005).
Continue reading...The actor on discovering hiking, choosing dessert and attending church online
What gets you up? Three rabidly hungry dogs demanding to be fed – it’s the same every morning here in Los Angeles. Normally we’d head to church, although now we’re attending virtually. It remains a surreal way to take part in such a communal activity.
How do you unwind? With MMA fights. For some reason I find watching grown men turn each other into burger meat very relaxing. I love that on Sunday I’m commanded from on high to take a break: self-obsession is an occupational hazard for every actor. Thinking beyond that, however briefly, is healthy.
Continue reading...Gal Gadot does battle with supervillains and everyday sexism in DC’s cliche-clobbering sequel. Is it a sign of the genre’s future?
There’s a scene in Wonder Woman 1984 where the luminous Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) glides into a crowded party. Everyone is staring at her – but this is no Cinderella moment, with admiring glances and a collective gasp. It’s an exposé of sexual harassment. The camera switches to Diana’s POV, and we experience a series of persistent, entitled men cracking on to a woman who is clearly not interested. It’s a rare case of a superhero movie showing everyday sexism from the woman’s point of view.
Related: Wonder Woman 1984 review – queenly Gal Gadot disarms the competition
Continue reading...English performer played bounty hunter Boba Fett in original trilogy
Star Wars actor Jeremy Bulloch, who played Boba Fett in the original films, has died aged 75.
The English actor died in hospital on Thursday from “health complications following his many years living with Parkinson’s disease”, according to his agent.
Continue reading...Analysis: A leaked recording of the movie star yelling at crew on his latest blockbuster is not evidence of tyranny, but the extraordinary strain of keeping the huge undertaking afloat
It is a lonely business, being a Tom Cruise fan in 2020. The heel lifts, the way his arms pump when he runs (nobody runs like Tom Cruise), his Dorian Gray looks: I love Cruise for all of it, and yet I’m aware this is a deeply unfashionable opinion, and one I’m often called on to defend at dinner parties. And so it befalls me, as Cruise’s solitary champion, to step to his aid now, like Ethan Hunt in a tuxedo taking on a posse of earpiece-wearing hitmen, as behind him an orchestra plays Nessun Dorma.
Related: Top bun: Tom Cruise's cake-mailing habit proves he's a real Christmas miracle | Stuart Heritage
Continue reading...The actor reflects on the diverse casting of the Netflix period drama, facing up to British history and how the pandemic has made him find new ways to ‘make my skills useful to other people’
“As an artist, you have to constantly ask yourself: ‘Why this story? Why now?’”, says Regé-Jean Page. The 30-year-old actor is video-calling from his apartment in Los Angeles and expounding on his latest role as the rakishly debonair Duke of Hastings in the Regency-era romance Bridgerton.
A frothy period drama bolstered by a lavish Netflix budget might not seem like the most pressing nor most relevant of artistic choices for Page to be making. Yet, he sees the eight-part series as a subversive act, because of its diverse cast injecting multiculturalism and a boundary-breaking sense of sexual intensity into a traditionally white, staid setting.
Continue reading...Alongside our countdown of the best films of 2020, our chief film critic selects his favourite movies, directors and performances of the year
As for everyone and everything else, this has been a traumatising year for cinema. Many new movies have had to be viewed at home, on streaming services, and cinephiles have had to accept this arrangement, rather like gourmets who see their favourite restaurants survive by repurposing themselves as delivery and takeaway centres. And streaming has, arguably, given a new audience to independent and arthouse cinema that might not otherwise have much of a showing in theatres.
Lockdown has intensified the debate about the validity of the small-screen experience of cinema – and it’s especially intense for me, when I consider one of my favourite films of the year. Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock is one of the glorious works in McQueen’s superb five-movie Small Axe sequence about the Black British experience. It is gloriously cinematic and was slated to feature at this year’s (cancelled) Cannes film festival. But it was commissioned by the BBC, and so the vast majority of the people enjoying this wonderful film will be doing so on the small screen. That’s why it is being described, understandably, as one the television highlights of the year.
Continue reading...The film star can be heard saying ‘if you don’t do it, you’re fired’, reportedly after crew members in Leavesden studios failed to socially distance
Tom Cruise has been recorded screaming obscenities at crew members on his current film Mission: Impossible 7 after apparent breaches of on-set social distancing guidelines.
The Sun published an audio recording of Cruise shouting and swearing at film crew on the project, of which is he one of the producers, threatening instant dismissal of anyone found to be contravening distancing rules.
Continue reading...Gadot is terrifically imposing, while Kristen Wiig is the scene-stealing antagonist in Patty Jenkins’ epically brash sequel
Here is an enjoyable Amazonian incursion into Reagan’s America – but the real wonder is Kristen Wiig, playing the warrior queen’s resentful and emotionally wounded antagonist, Barbara Minerva.
It is 1984, that pre-Covid utopian era of big hair, rolled-up jacket sleeves and imminent nuclear war, and Diana of Themyscira is getting her second superheroic adventure in a world dominated by over-promoted mortal males. The first time we saw this mythical warrior queen, played as here by Gal Gadot, and with outrageously gorgeous outfits, she had just surreally shown up in the middle of the first world war. Now Diana Prince (she is never called Wonder Woman, even obliquely) is living discreetly as a civilian in the Washington of Ronald Reagan – or as discreetly as someone so resplendent can.
Prince works as a demure archaeologist at the Smithsonian museum, and it is here that Diana examines an ancient stone that has the magical power to grant any person one wish. Poor, lonely Diana silently wishes to be reunited with Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) the dashing airman with whom she was once very much in love. But her nerdy colleague, maladroit gemologist Minerva, who has a beta-stalkerish fascination with the impossibly gorgeous Diana, wishes to be every bit as strong as her. And there is a third wisher: megalomaniac oil entrepreneur and museum donor Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), who wants more than one wish, so he sneakily wishes to be turned into the stone, to become a human wishing stone, so that he can persuade any individual he meets to wish for something beneficial to his interests. Could it be that Maxwell Lord is a version of Norman Vincent Peale, the positive-thinking guru who was such an influence on presidents Nixon and Trump?
Continue reading...