Category Archives: Film

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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Hilaria Baldwin speaks out amid accusations she faked being Spanish

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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.

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Mayor review – grappling with reality inside Ramallah city hall

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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.

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Dune, Bond and Top Gun returns: Films to look out for in 2021

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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

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Feed your soul: the 31-day literary diet for January

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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).

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When every set looks like Contagion: inside Hollywood’s pandemic year

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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.

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Future shock: how will Covid change the course of business?

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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.

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The film quiz of the year: do you know the Queen’s favourite or which one inspired John Lennon?

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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.

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Coolie No 1 review – David Dhawan’s comedy remake is bigger but not better

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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.

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Why is Pixar so brilliant at death?

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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.

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T’Nia Miller: ‘I never saw a queer person on TV when I was growing up’

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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.

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Jeremy Bulloch obituary

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Stage and screen actor who played the bounty hunter Boba Fett in the Star Wars films

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).

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