Category Archives: Film

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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Sunday with David Oyelowo: ‘I unwind by watching MMA fights’

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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.

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Gal power: is Wonder Woman 1984 the first #MeToo superhero movie?

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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

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Star Wars actor Jeremy Bulloch dies aged 75

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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.

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Breaking point: why Tom Cruise is living a mission impossible

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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

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Regé-Jean Page on Bridgerton: ‘We’re seeing this Regency romance through a feminist lens’

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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.

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The 2020 Braddies go to … Peter Bradshaw’s film picks of the year

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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.

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Tom Cruise recorded shouting and swearing at Mission: Impossible crew over Covid issues

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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.

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Wonder Woman 1984 review – queenly Gal Gadot disarms the competition

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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?

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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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