Category Archives: Film

When film stars attack: Russell Crowe’s reaction to criticism could set a trend

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The actor’s unexpected response to a complaint about an 18-year-old film could pave the way for big-name actors to personally insult Twitter users

One of the most surprising new avenues to have formed for celebrities over the course of the pandemic has been Cameo. For the uninitiated, Cameo is a service where celebrities can create personalised messages for their fans. For £75, Hodor from Game of Thrones will wish you a happy birthday or – if you have £750 lying around – Richard Dreyfuss will put on a Jaws shirt and struggle to pronounce your name.

But maybe this isn’t enough for you. Maybe you want to find direct engagement, with a much bigger star than Cameo offers, and for free. If that’s the case, I can heartily endorse not liking a Russell Crowe movie. Because, even if it takes him a while, Crowe will do his best to respond to your criticism. And if you’re really lucky, he’ll sound like an out-of-touch bus stop crackpot in the process. Here’s what happened.

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About Some Meaningless Events review – attempted murder and the movies

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In this intriguing film, banned in the 70s, Mostafa Derkaoui grapples with the purpose of cinema on the streets of Casablanca

Here is an intriguing, bewildering fragment of what might be called underground new-wave cinema from Moroccan director Mostafa Derkaoui: a docu-fiction shown once in Paris in 1975, but then immediately banned by the Moroccan government after which it disappeared from view, resurfacing in 2016 when a negative was found in the archives of Filmoteca De Catalunya in Barcelona.

Derkaoui and a group of other young film-makers are shown hanging out in Casablanca, in a bar and on the streets and at the port, interviewing people about what they think cinema should be doing. Long scenes in bars spool past, apparently semi-improvised, in which the film-makers and their interviewees get very drunk, among lots of other drunk people who are always on the verge of an argument or a fist fight They occasionally ask young women in the bar what they think about cinema and shamelessly tell them they are beautiful enough to be in the movies, asking for their contact details.

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Asa Butterfield: ‘Sex Education reassures people they’re not weird or alone’

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The actor on filming the third series of the hit Netflix comedy, being taught cinema history by Scorsese – and the perils of toilet-training his cat

Asa Butterfield, 23, was born in London and started his acting career aged seven. He landed the lead roles in Holocaust drama The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas at 10 and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo at 13. Other film credits include Journey’s End, X+Y, Greed, Son of Rambow and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. He stars as teenager Otis Milburn in the hit Netflix comedy Sex Education and is currently filming its third season.

How is shooting going on Sex Education?
It’s something of a miracle being back on set. When we started, it was a bit like being let out of prison. It was the first time anyone had been in a big group of people for months and we were all overexcited. We’ve slipped into the rhythm of the new normal now. To work is a blessing. I won’t take it for granted again.

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On my radar: Jason Williamson’s cultural highlights

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The Sleaford Mods frontman on a favourite singer-songwriter, a hellish horror film and why he spends seven hours a day on Twitter

Jason Williamson, lead vocalist of English electronic punk music duo Sleaford Mods, was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire in 1970. He moved to Nottingham in 1995, where he began working with rock band Spiritualized and electronic duo Bent. In 2009, he met Andrew Fearn and they released the first Sleaford Mods album, Divide and Exit, in 2014. They have since been called “the voice of Britain” by their fans and “the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band” by Iggy Pop. Their latest album, Spare Ribs, is out now on Rough Trade Records. The band will tour the UK in late 2021.

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Ben Chaplin: ‘The last thing I wanted to be was the new Hugh Grant’

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The Game On actor has had Hollywood success without becoming an A-lister. But working with Malick, Stone and Francis Ford Coppola has made for an interesting career

Sitting in the Los Angeles sun in a T-shirt and a hoodie, Ben Chaplin has a coffee cup in one hand and a cigarette between two fingers of the other. He is chipper this morning, if a little wary about technology, after a mishap last year.

“My first Zoom thing was also my first ever Seder dinner,” says the 51-year-old actor. “My girlfriend is Jewish and I was feeling like this total charlatan, this goy, among all her elderly relatives.” Suddenly, the screen turned blue and a curved white line emerged, guided by an unseen hand. “This older voice asked: ‘What’s going on?’ And then you start to see the classic cartoon penis. I’m embarrassed by how funny I found it. I was thinking: ‘Are they going to draw hairs on the balls?’ But then it cut off. Apparently, a kid from one of the families was responsible. Good on him. Hahaha!”

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Dear Comrades! review – searing account of a Soviet-era massacre | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week

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Andrei Konchalovsky’s account of the day Red Army soldiers and KGB snipers opened fire on strikers is a rage-filled triumph

Anger burns a hole through the screen in this stark monochrome picture from veteran director Andrei Konchalovsky: a gruelling re-enactment of the hushed-up Novocherkassk massacre in western Russia in 1962, when Red Army soldiers and KGB snipers opened fire on unarmed striking workers, killing an estimated 80 people. It was a day of spiritual nausea for the Soviet Union, which had only just entered Khrushchev’s new de-Stalinised era of supposed enlightenment – a postwar civilian bloodbath that was the Soviets’ Sharpeville, or Kent State, or Bloody Sunday, or indeed the Corpus Christi massacre in Mexico City that featured in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.

Yuliya Vysotskaya – a longtime Konchalovsky player – plays Lyuda, a Communist party official and single mother who lives in a tiny flat in Novocherkassk with her 18-year-old daughter Svetka (Yuliya Burova) and grizzled old dad (Sergei Erlish). There are terrible food shortages, yet Lyuda is a loyal and uncomplaining party member who not so secretly pines for the good old days of Josef Stalin, when the Soviet Union was bathed in glorious wartime destiny and when things seemed to be better all round. Now she is having a furtive affair with a cynical and bleary married committee official who doesn’t even seem to like her very much.

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Armie Hammer drops out of Jennifer Lopez film amid social media controversy

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Hammer was due to appear opposite Lopez in the action comedy Shotgun Wedding but has requested to step away

Armie Hammer has dropped out of an upcoming film with Jennifer Lopez after messages allegedly sent by the actor were leaked online. Hammer has described the messages and social media response to them as an online attack, calling them vicious and spurious.

Hammer, star of movies including The Social Network and Call Me By Your Name, had been set to appear opposite Lopez in action comedy Shotgun Wedding. However, he will no longer take the role.

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Imperial Blue review – Ugandan adventures of a drug-smuggling dope

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A dealer who dreams of discovering the source of a mystical substance that lets you see the future heads deep into Africa

Drug smuggler Hugo (Nicolas Fagerberg) has “the connect”. Or he’d like to think he does. Certainly this debut feature from British director Dan Moss knows several good spots, guiding us through a series of impressive locations with the confidence of a seasoned traveller. After Hugo’s big-money hashish deal in a partly flooded Mumbai building site goes wrong, he’s introduced to Bulu, a blue-powdered hallucinogen with mystical properties. “They say it makes you see the future,” says his go-between (Ashish Verma). Could this mysterious substance make Hugo enough money to satisfy his UK-based bosses? He’ll have to track down a supply source first.

Everything about the London drug world that Hugo then stops off in – from the 80s punk get-ups of the big players to the readiness with which these supposedly shrewd operators approve Hugo’s wild goose chase – is risibly unrealistic. But he’s soon en route to “Fort Lugard, Uganda”, where the plot is on safer ground.

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‘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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