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’
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.
Continue reading...Francis Ford Coppola: ‘Life is a great screenwriter’
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!
Continue reading...Richard Curtis on Four Weddings: ‘I don’t know how fully I thought through Andie MacDowell’s character’
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%.
Continue reading...Let Them All Talk review – haughty Meryl Streep is queen of the high seas
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.
Continue reading...Murder Me, Monster review – a grisly mystery that stays boldly unsolvable
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
Continue reading...Fine Young Cannibal Roland Gift: ‘I went back to where being pretty didn’t matter’
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.
Continue reading...Anything for Jackson review – grieving grandparents do a deal with the devil
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.
Continue reading...A Girl from Mogadishu review – tragedy and joy in a daring escape
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.
Continue reading...Elliot Page: star of X-Men and Juno announces he is transgender
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.”
Continue reading...The Prom review – is Ryan Murphy’s musical the first film of the Biden era?
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!”
Continue reading...Helena Bonham Carter says The Crown should stress to viewers it’s a drama
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”.
Continue reading...Hugh Grant’s Undoing: how romcom leading men embraced the dark side
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.
Continue reading...Scandal’s Kerry Washington: ‘My mother’s nightmare was for me to be a starving actress’
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.”
Continue reading...Darth Vader actor Dave Prowse dies aged 85
Former weightlifter and actor best known for playing Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies has died, his agent has said
David “Dave” Prowse, the actor best known for playing Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, has died at the age of 85, his agent has said.
Agent Thomas Bowington said: “It’s with great regret and heart-wrenching sadness for us and million of fans around the world, to announce that our client Dave Prowse MBE has passed away at the age of 85.”
Continue reading...Director Asif Kapadia: ‘Diego and Maradona were two different people’
Film director recalls the long and rocky road to meeting the mercurial subject of his film
Football is a huge part of my life. I was 14 when Diego Maradona scored the two goals against England – the hand of God and the wonder goal. Despite the first goal, I always thought he was the best player in the world. I’ve always been a fan of outsiders, rebels.
Everyone wanted to be Maradona. He was the global phenomenon. The pope wanted to meet him. Fidel Castro would sit and listen to Diego tell a story.
Continue reading...‘It took me three days to get over the orgy scene’: Muscle star Craig Fairbrass
The Londoner has spent years slogging away in hardman movies, but his latest film is a darkly funny exploration of masculinity. He discusses branching out – and the film’s unsimulated sex
Craig Fairbrass has made a career from giving a certain type of person exactly what they want. His films have titles such as Deranged and Hijacked and St George’s Day. There are gangsters. There are guns. There are posters that look like a recently divorced dad’s experiments with Photoshop.
His characters have nicknames that come in inverted commas, like Freddy “Dead Cert” Frankham and Malcolm “Mental Fists” Wickes. The films are usually released to little fanfare and lapped up by a small but dedicated crowd, unnoticed by the rest of the world.
Fairbrass’s new film, Muscle, is different. It is extraordinary: a black-and-white exploration of toxic masculinity that is as darkly funny as it is outright horrifying. Fairbrass is remarkable in it, playing a hulking personal trainer who sniffs out a lost loner at a squalid gym and immediately sets about exploiting him for everything he is worth. It is an incredible, committed performance that goes to some unthinkably gruesome places. Remember the shock of seeing Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler after his wilderness years? We are in that sort of territory.
From Nurse Ratched to Joker: 10 of the best movie villains
Sadism, demons and disappearing pencils: these are the big-screen baddies whose evil antics have haunted our nightmares
Continue reading...‘People in their 40s were crying’: the sad final days of New York’s coolest record store
Other Music fuelled New York’s 00s indie boom, boasting Vampire Weekend and Animal Collective among its fans. Then it closed. A new documentary tells the story of the store’s tragic demise – and its ‘terrifying’ staff
A lot of skulking went on at Other Music, the celebrated New York record store. It was an odd kind of dance: nervous customers, hiding behind CD racks or LP sleeves, trying to conjure up a question that wouldn’t result in utter humiliation. The staff there had quite a reputation, after all.
The experience is relived in a surprisingly moving new documentary about the shop, also called Other Music. Notable fans Regina Spektor and Jason Schwartzman still sound daunted by Other’s intense atmosphere. “If I’m completely honest, I was never just ‘chill’ in there,” confides Spektor, to camera. “I always got that first-day-of-school feeling, like: OK, just don’t fuck up.”
Continue reading...Viggo Mortensen on Falling star Lance Henriksen: ‘He’s like a wolf who might gobble you up’
In the former’s directorial debut, the pair play a father and son facing up to the older man’s dementia. It offers 80-year-old Henriksen the meatiest role of his astonishing career
Viggo Mortensen first met Lance Henriksen when he shot him dead. Mortensen, the Lord of the Rings star and three-time best actor Oscar nominee, was facing off the older actor – a veteran of more than 200 movies including Aliens and The Terminator – in the 2008 western Appaloosa.
“There were so many bullets flying around; I don’t think any one person can take the credit for killing me,” smiles Henriksen, his voice sandpapery but sweet. As we wait for Mortensen to join our video call, he says he is tip-top today. “I turned 80. But I don’t feel no 80.” Then he switches the subject abruptly. “I can’t tell you how much Falling has changed my life,” he says.
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