Category Archives: Film

Top bun: Tom Cruise’s cake-mailing habit proves he’s a real Christmas miracle | Stuart Heritage

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Rosie O’Donnell, Jimmy Fallon and Graham Norton are just a few of the famous recipients of the ‘Cruise cake’, a white chocolate coconut ring which might as well be a halo

Tom Cruise follows me on Twitter. Until now, I have been relatively proud of this fact, even though he follows tens of thousands of people, and only tweets three times a year, and his account is probably run by his staff, and he wouldn’t actually be able to tell you what Twitter was if you held a gun to his head. Regardless, I was proud.

But now I feel like a failure, because Tom Cruise has never sent me a cake. And it turns out that all Tom Cruise does is send cakes to people. According to Yahoo, every year he orders more than 100 white chocolate coconut bundt cakes from Doan’s Bakery in Woodland Hills, California, and sends them to his famous friends. Rosie O’Donnell gets one. Kirsten Dunst gets one. Jimmy Fallon gets one. James Corden gets one. Graham Norton gets one, and his staff eat it without telling him. Henry Cavill called it “the most decadent, the most amazing cake”. Barbara Walters once ate hers live on television, in a power move as yet unmatched by any mortal human.

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Cher at 74: ‘There are 20-year-old girls who can’t do what I do’

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Her $60m annual Las Vegas residency was off the cards this year, but the singer still has lots to say about animal rights, Trump’s ‘toxic’ politics, cosmetic surgery and the men in her life

The Goddess of Pop is in town. And what an entrance she makes. Two-tone black-and-white beret, matching jacket, skinny jeans, black boots, black mask, and an elephant-shaped knuckle-duster. She looks the ultimate in revolutionary chic – Cher Guevara. She is not in London to promote a record (100m sold and counting) or a film (she won the best actress Oscar in 1988 for Moonstruck); she is here to talk about rescuing the world’s loneliest elephant from a zoo in Pakistan and flying him to a sanctuary in Cambodia. Cherilyn Sarkisian, aged 74, has never been predictable.

We meet in a London hotel, close to the BBC’s Broadcasting House, where she has been eulogising elephants. She is masked, I am masked, and we sit at opposite ends of the room. It’s such a strange world we’re living in, I say – how are you coping? And she is straight off into a turbo-charged rant. “How am I taking it? There are no words that describe it. And in my country the president doesn’t believe it has anything to do with him. He doesn’t think he has any responsibility to help us.”

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Olivia Colman on acting: ‘Take your job seriously and not yourself’

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Star of The Crown and Peep Show opens up on her career, revealing she is plagued by self-doubt

She won an Oscar for her performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite, and is a household name thanks to roles as wide-ranging as Sophie in Peep Show and Queen Elizabeth in The Crown. But, despite such success, Olivia Colman has revealed she is plagued by self-doubt and a fear of unemployment, having never forgotten the pain of repeated rejection at the start of her career.

Colman, 46, graduated from the Bristol Old Vic theatre school more than two decades ago, but still recalls her early struggles and “the horrible feeling” of no one calling after she went up for acting jobs. “All those hundreds of auditions I did in the first two years. They don’t just say ‘sorry, no thank you’. You don’t hear anything. That’s heartbreaking.”

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Sean Connery remembered by Jackie Stewart

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25 August 1930 – 31 October 2020

The former F1 racing driver on the iconic James Bond star and advocate for all things Scottish who was his friend for 50 years

When people think of Sean of course they think of James Bond, but he wasn’t really acting when he was playing that part. In real life, when he walked into a room, he walked like James Bond and he talked like James Bond, which people could find disconcerting. That was because he didn’t change anything about himself, including his Scottish accent, which tells you a lot about the man.

Sean was a very tough man in some ways, but very sensitive in others. I first met him in 1971 when he was setting up a charity to help young Scots [the Scottish International Education Trust], wanting me to get involved – he liked how I projected Scotland to the world as a racing driver. He loved his country but realised it had its limitations – even though Glasgow’s fine art is renowned, he knew there weren’t similar opportunities elsewhere in the arts. He understood why people moved away for new opportunities, given he had come from a very ordinary background himself and done that, but he wanted Scotland to thrive from within.

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David Byrne: ‘Spike Lee and I have a lot in common’

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The former Talking Heads frontman on the importance of performance, covering Janelle Monáe, and his hope for the American experiment

David Byrne is one of popular culture’s great polymaths: a musician, producer, artist, actor, author, record label owner and film-maker. He was a founding member and lead singer of the influential post-punk group Talking Heads and has had a long and varied solo career that has included collaborations with Brian Eno and St Vincent. The film of Byrne’s acclaimed 2019 Broadway stage production of the album American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee, is available on digital download from tomorrow and DVD on 11 January.

How has the lockdown been for you?
When it was warmer, I could go for bike rides around [New York] with friends and band members, so we could at least see each other and explore parts of the city we didn’t know. I still do that occasionally but it’s a little bit harder now it’s getting colder.

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George Clooney: ‘It’s been a crappy year, but we will come out of it better’

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Marriage and fatherhood have given George Clooney a new perspective on life, work and the world we all share. While his young twins play outside, he talks about outsmarting war criminals, battles with Boris and dinnertime debates with Amal

Dad-chat with George Clooney, father of two. While the actor’s twin three-year-olds, Ella and Alexander, are out on the family tennis court, learning to ride their bikes, Clooney sits in a curtained edit suite inside his Los Angeles home, wondering how they’re getting on out there. “They’ve learned how to get going fast,” says the 59-year-old who, unless otherwise specified, speaks at all times in the measured, half-ironic, woodsmoked tones of just about every leading man he’s played in a quarter-century career. “They just haven’t learned to use their brakes yet.”

Clooney rubs at his two-day beard, anxious, fond. He wears a fawn-coloured polo shirt and he has his grey hair cropped short. I think I notice that slightly wild-eyed look of someone still marvelling at the fact of their parenthood, and I ask him, is he a scaredy-cat dad, always trailing behind his children with his arms outstretched in case they fall? Or is he a let-them-fall-to-learn-about-the-hard-truths-of-the-world sort of dad?

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George Clooney: Why we owe our domestic bliss to … Boris Johnson

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Row over Parthenon marbles deflected attention from secret courtship with wife Amal, star reveals

George Clooney will not be sending Boris Johnson a Christmas card, but he may send a thank-you note to No 10 – along with a comb, he told the Observer this weekend.

The Hollywood film star and director has recognised he owes part of his current domestic contentment and job satisfaction to a strange run-in he had with the prime minister early in 2014, while Clooney was secretly courting his future wife, Amal.

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Kim Ki-duk: punk-Buddhist shock, violence – and hypnotic beauty too

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The South Korean director, who has died of Covid, was at the forefront of a new wave of uncompromising cinema

Of all the film-makers of what might loosely be called the new Asian wave of the 21st century, perhaps the most challenging and mysterious – and probably the most garlanded on the European festival circuit – was South Korean director Kim Ki-duk. He made movies which were shocking, scabrous and violent - yet also often hauntingly sad and plangently beautiful and sometimes just plain weird. But they were strangely hypnotic. In 2011, I was on the Cannes Un Certain Regard jury which gave the top prize to his opaque docufictional piece Arirang, and though I struggle a bit now to recapture the mood of certainty that led us to that decision, there is no doubt about that Kim’s work had a commanding effect.

In fact, Kim himself might be a more prominent figure himself were it not that he was involved in the #MeToo controversy – three actors accused him of sexual assault which resulted in a fine for the director and inconclusive recrimination in the civil courts.

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Controversial South Korean director Kim Ki-duk dies of Covid aged 59

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The director, who faced accusations of sexual misconduct, died while being treated in Latvia

Controversial South Korean film-maker Kim Ki-duk has died aged 59 in a Latvian hospital, where he was being treated for Covid-19. The news was initially reported by Vitaly Mansky, director of Latvia’s Artdocfest film festival, though and later confirmed by Kim’s family in the Korean media. Kim was understood to be developing a film project set in the Baltic region when he became ill.

Born in 1960, Kim made his name with a series of violent yet aesthetically challenging features, including The Isle (2000) and Bad Guy (2001) – the former of which was sanctioned by the British Board of Film Classification for animal cruelty. Subsequently he became a fixture on the international festival circuit with films such as Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring (2003) and 3-Iron (2004), and he would go on to win the Golden Lion at Venice with his 2012 film Pieta, which the Guardian described as “bristl[ing] with Kim’s trademark anger and agony”.

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Disney announce 10 Star Wars and 10 Marvel series – and new films

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Hayden Christensen returns as Darth Vader in the Obi-Wan Kenobi mini-series, while Chadwick Boseman won’t be replaced for Black Panther sequel

Disney has unveiled a huge slew of new projects for the next decade at an investor event.

Speaking on Thursday, Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy announced that the new Star Wars film, Rogue Squadron, will be directed by Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins – the first time a female director has taken charge of one of the franchise films.

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Barbara Windsor, star of Carry On films and EastEnders, dies at 83

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Husband says ‘final weeks were typical of how she lived her life. Full of humour, drama and a fighting spirit until the end’

Dame Barbara Windsor, best known for her roles in EastEnders and the Carry On films, has died aged 83, her husband Scott Mitchell has said.

Mitchell said in a statement: “It is with deep sadness that I can confirm that my darling wife Barbara passed away at 8.35pm on Thursday 10 December at a London care home.

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The Wolf Dividing Norway: the hunter v the environmentalist

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With unique access to remote communities in the snow-capped landscape of Norway, this film follows characters on either side of a fierce debate on whether to cull the wolf population. For decades the topic has split political parties, families and communities across the country, with environmentalists world-wide criticising Norway for how it handles its tiny population of critically endangered wolves. Here, a group of hunters await news from the government on whether their yearly hunt will be permitted, while the environmentalists anticipate the worst. With angry threats on both sides, the film takes a deep dive into what’s at stake for both groups, as well as the wider world

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Brandon Cronenberg on gougings, knifings and pokerings: ‘CGI is too floaty and unreal’

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The horror director is back with a sci-fi shocker about mind-robbing assassins going on violent killing sprees. He tells our writer why digital effects just don’t cut the eyeball

Brandon Cronenberg has the sniffles. This would not be worthy of note, but for the fact that the 40-year-old Canadian film-maker, son of horror pioneer David, made his directorial debut in 2012 with Antiviral, about a clinic that harvests diseases from celebrities. For the right price, patients can be infected with Hollywood herpes, or catch the exact strain of flu that caused their favourite singer to cancel a tour. So whose cold is he wearing? “Nothing so interesting,” says Cronenberg through a bunged-up nose. “It’s just sinus trouble. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be disgusting.”

It’s a bit late for that, as anyone who has seen his films will attest. In Antiviral, restaurants serve steaks cultivated from A-list muscle tissue – while his new psychological horror, Possessor, features assassins who inhabit people’s bodies via neural implants, then use them as puppets to carry out hits. One such operative, played by Andrea Riseborough, is having difficulty negotiating the work-life balance. Although equipped with a gun, she takes it upon herself to sever her victim’s jugular instead. The stabbing felt “in character”, she says during her debriefing, to which her boss, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, asks: “Whose character?” Decanted into another patsy, Riseborough goes wild, driving a poker into her target’s mouth and breaking his teeth like biscuits, before gouging out an eyeball for good measure.

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Francis Ford Coppola: ‘Life is a great screenwriter’

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The film director, 81, on beauty in the eye of the audience, finishing with The Godfather and the family of humanity

Being able to critique yourself is a good skill. Often when a film has been released I’ll ask: “Did I make mistakes?” When I made The Cotton Club in 1984, people were telling me there were too many black people in it and too much tap dancing. I would say: “But it’s a movie about black people tap dancing.” Years later, I realised I had taken out half of the backstory. It was good to go back and fix that.

Life is a great screenwriter. My daughter, Sofia, got such awful, unjust criticism for her performance in The Godfather Part III. She was 18 and was being told she’d ruined her father’s film. It was a deep wound for the poor kid. They were gunning for me, but she took the bullets. Now she is a more famous movie director than me. She got the last laugh!

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Richard Curtis on Four Weddings: ‘I don’t know how fully I thought through Andie MacDowell’s character’

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The film has topped a poll for the most rewatchable film. Its director, Mike Newell, sees why. So why would Curtis, who wrote the script, rather rewatch Elf?

Richard Curtis rarely rewatches Four Weddings and a Funeral. “There isn’t a natural circumstance where I say: ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do for the next two hours, see one of my films.’” Partly, it is knowing the punchlines. Partly, it is being a bit busy. On the wall of Curtis’s Notting Hill home office (stucco fireplace, neon art, whopping clock), just out of frame of his laptop camera, are six Post-it reminders of pre-Christmas tasks. Wrap presents? Make pud? Nope: rewrite a film, cast an online panto, appoint a new CEO for Comic Relief. Et cetera.

Anyway, for those of us a bit less pressed, things are different. Four Weddings – in which Hugh Grant’s stuttering bachelor, in a series of morning suits, woos Andie MacDowell – was the runaway winner in a new, slightly strange poll to find Britain’s most rewatchable movie. In a list of 50 films co-curated by the British Film Institute and Google Pixel, the tale of Charles and Carrie took 49% of the votes, with Skyfall on 37% and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on 33%.

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Let Them All Talk review – haughty Meryl Streep is queen of the high seas

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Tensions arise between a writer and her coterie aboard an ocean liner in Steven Soderbergh’s sweet, unfocused drama

There’s an awful lot going on in this new movie from Steven Soderbergh. The title is appropriate: it’s garrulous, elegant, bristling with classy performances from an A-list cast, and Deborah Eisenberg’s screenplay has a theatrical intimacy. It’s loosely and waywardly plotted, perhaps as a result of having gone through many drafts, though maybe not enough. It is slightly unfocused and uncertain as to where its emotional centre really lies – though there is a charm and a big dramatic finale.

The story is mostly set (and economically filmed, by Soderbergh himself) on a luxury liner, , the Queen Mary 2, crossing from New York to Southampton. Meryl Streep plays Alice Hughes, a renowned novelist whose reputation and sales rely chiefly on a sensational early book about the collapse of a woman’s marriage. Her agent (Gemma Chan) takes her out for lunch and has to charm her cantankerous client into going to London to accept a prestigious award; she is also nervous about the fact that Alice still hasn’t delivered her latest manuscript but excited at the rumours that it could be a sequel to the sensational early book.

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Murder Me, Monster review – a grisly mystery that stays boldly unsolvable

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This convention-defying horror has Guillermo del Toro’s vision and David Lynch’s dreamlike logic. But what does it all mean?

Internal affairs takes on new meaning in this distinctively involuted Argentine thriller about a spate of gruesome decapitations in an Andes backwater. Police officer Cruz (Victor Lopez) is already on the case when his lover Francisca (Tania Casciani) becomes the next to have her head apparently chewed off, a mysterious green goo smeared on the stump. Her hollow-eyed husband David (Esteban Bigliardi) is suspect numero uno: he is found naked in the vicinity of the victims and, after later being carted off to an asylum, testifies to a strange voice in his head that whispers: “Murder me, monster.”

Related: My streaming gem: why you should watch The Distinguished Citizen

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Fine Young Cannibal Roland Gift: ‘I went back to where being pretty didn’t matter’

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He was ‘the first black punk in Hull’ and was named one of the world’s 50 most beautiful people. But the singer turned his back on pop stardom. He reveals why he’s returning with a gritty musical about a band called The Blacks

There are no film posters up in Roland Gift’s house in Holloway, London, and the platinum discs are all packed away. It’s a home that gives few clues to the remarkable life story the 59-year-old is about to recount: how the “first black punk in Hull” went on to become an international pop and movie star.

“I’ve always been afraid of getting wrapped up with fame and that glamour world,” is how he puts it today. Indeed, even when Gift’s band, Fine Young Cannibals, topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with their 1989 second album, The Raw & the Cooked (reissued this month, along with their eponymous 1985 debut), he had an uneasy relationship with stardom.

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Anything for Jackson review – grieving grandparents do a deal with the devil

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In a riotously gory inversion of the Christmas story, an older couple plan to channel the ghost of their dead grandson into an unborn child

There’s something deliciously subversive about the backstory to this offbeat horror film, which was made in Canada. Director Justin G Dyck and screenwriter Keith Cooper have collaborated on a long list of treacly, holiday-themed, made-for-TV movies with titles such as A Very Country Christmas, Christmas With a View and A Christmas Village. Anything for Jackson, however, is a riotously gory, impish inversion of all things yuletide, in that it stars sweet-featured elderly character actors Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings as grieving grandparents Audrey and Henry Walsh, who kidnap pregnant Shannon Becker (Konstantina Mantelos) in order to perform a satanic ritual on her. It’s as if Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer, the little old couple who lived next door in Rosemary’s Baby, got to be the stars of their own movie.

Audrey and Henry’s goal is to channel the ghost of their dead grandson, Jackson, into Becker’s unborn child; but, wouldn’t you know it, deals with the devil have a way of going wrong – or having nasty consequences in the fine print, such as bringing forth demons and ghosts with murderous instincts of their own. Plus, their main adviser on matters demonological is a bitter “incel”-type (Josh Cruddas) who lives with his mother and is prone to bitching about the leadership at their satanic church, an outfit quietly run out of the local community centre where members bring home-baked goods for breaktime.

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