Category Archives: Film

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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A Girl from Mogadishu review – tragedy and joy in a daring escape

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This based-on-fact story of a teenager who flees war in Somalia to become a crusading activist against FGM is earnest but effective drama

Inspired by real events, this earnest but effective drama depicts how Ifrah Ahmed (played as a teenager by Malaika Herrador, and as an adult by Aja Naomi King) escaped Somalia during a war in 2006, made it to Ireland where she was eventually granted asylum, and then went on to become a crusading activist against female genital mutilation. It’s certainly a remarkable story, one full of tragedy, adventure, suspense and even moments of joy, especially in the latter half when Ahmed finds a community of friends and allies willing to help her quest.

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Elliot Page: star of X-Men and Juno announces he is transgender

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Actor takes aim at transphobic politicians and ‘those with a massive platform who continue to spew hostility’, saying they ‘have blood on [their] hands’

Elliot Page, who rose to fame as the lead in teen pregnancy comedy Juno as Ellen Page, has announced he is transgender.

“Hi friends,” he wrote on a variety of social media platforms, “I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot.”

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The Prom review – is Ryan Murphy’s musical the first film of the Biden era?

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Taste the treacle as Nicole Kidman’s Broadway liberals rebuke a rural high school – and learn a few things about themselves

Like High School Musical on some sort of absinthe/Xanax cocktail, The Prom is an outrageous work of steroidal show tune madness, directed by the dark master himself, Ryan “Glee” Murphy, who is to jazz-hands musical theatre what Nancy Meyers is to upscale romcom or Friedrich Nietzsche to classical philology.

Meryl Streep and James Corden play Dee Dee Allen and Barry Glickman, two fading Broadway stars in trouble after their latest show closes ignominiously; it is called Eleanor!, a misjudged musical version of the life of Eleanor Roosevelt with Dee Dee in the title role and Barry as Franklin D Roosevelt. Barry also has financial difficulties (“I had to declare bankruptcy after my self-produced Notes on a Scandal”). After unhelpful press notices turn their opening night party at Sardi’s into a wake, Dee Dee and Barry find themselves drowning their sorrows with chorus-line trooper Angie (Nicole Kidman) and unemployed-actor-turned-bartender Trent (played by The Book of Mormon’s Andrew Rannells). How on earth are they going to turn their careers around?

Then Angie sees a news story trending on Twitter: a gay teenager in Indiana has been prevented by her high school from bringing a girl as a date to the prom. The teen in question is Emma (a nice performance from Jo Ellen Pellman, like a young Elisabeth Moss), her secret girlfriend is Alyssa (Ariana DeBose) and it is Alyssa’s fiercely conservative mom (Kerry Washington) who is behind the ban. Our heroic foursome declare that they will sweep into hicksville with all their enlightened values and glamorous celebrity, and campaign against this homophobia, boosting their prestige in the biz. They gatecrash a tense school meeting, declaring dramatically: “We are liberals from Broadway!”

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Helena Bonham Carter says The Crown should stress to viewers it’s a drama

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Actor who plays Princess Margaret adds her voice to calls for Netflix to add a disclaimer

Helena Bonham Carter has said The Crown has a “moral responsibility” to tell viewers that it is a drama, rather than historical fact, in the wake of calls for a “health warning” for people watching the series.

The actor, who played Princess Margaret in series three and four of the Netflix hit drama, told an official podcast for the show that there was an important distinction between “our version”, and the “real version”.

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Hugh Grant’s Undoing: how romcom leading men embraced the dark side

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No more Mr Nice Guys! With his role in the HBO miniseries, Grant – like Richard Gere and Vince Vaughn – has swapped charm for smarm, reflecting a changing society

Hugh Grant made his name in the 90s as a squeaky-clean charmer, but anyone who has been keeping tabs on his career will not have been surprised to see him show up in the HBO miniseries The Undoing as an unhinged philanderer, attacking a man with his bare teeth in a prison-yard brawl. For a while now, the actor who used to warm our hearts has been doing his best to chill our blood. And he has been doing it pretty well: as a scheming politician in A Very English Scandal, as a scheming investigator in The Gentlemen and, best of all, as a scheming theatre impresario in Paddington 2. As mid-career renewals go, Grant’s has been one of the best and The Undoing, six hours of top-notch trash that wraps up tonight, has made the most of its newly depraved star.

The reinvention of the romantic lead is hardly a new phenomenon – it is more than 75 years since Murder, My Sweet turned Dick Powell from a fresh-faced musical star to a whisky-addled noir antihero, but in recent years it has become an especially popular trope. Richard Gere, who, like Grant, found screen stardom by flirting faux-modestly with flattered young ladies, has lately gone to great pains to show off his ugly side. He forged a career from playing wealthy, winsome suitors, but his recent turns as a hedge-fund magnate (Arbitrage), a moneyed philanthropist (The Benefactor), a high-flying politician (The Dinner) and a Murdoch-esque media mogul (MotherFatherSon) have all helped to flip the twinkly-eyed archetype on its head. Gere’s message is clear: I’m not the white knight you all thought I was.

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Scandal’s Kerry Washington: ‘My mother’s nightmare was for me to be a starving actress’

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She hit the big time playing the high-powered political fixer Olivia Pope. In real life, she has spent years campaigning for Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats. So what’s someone who lives and breathes politics doing in Ryan Murphy’s musical The Prom?

In a rational world, somewhere deep in the Democratic National Committee headquarters, a small staff would be hard at work planning Kerry Washington’s presidential bid. “Washington 2028: Tough on Scandal” or “2032: Ms Kerry Goes to Washington” – the slogans just write themselves. Whether Washington could be persuaded to run for office is another matter. She is, she insists when we meet via a video call, too self-effacing for politics. “I feel you really have to decide that you’re the one, like: ‘I’m the one to solve this problem!’”

She is much more comfortable directing attention elsewhere. “For most of my career, I was really a character actor,” she says. “People didn’t connect that the girl from Ray was the same girl from Last King of Scotland, was the same girl from Save the Last Dance. And I loved that, because I got to disappear into these other people and it wasn’t about me.”

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