Category Archives: Film

Cuties controversy sparks #CancelNetflix campaign

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French film Mignonnes sparks 200,000 tweets calling for boycott of streaming service over claims the film sexualises its young stars

A call to boycott Netflix on Thursday over the French film Mignonnes – AKA Cuties – has been launched on social media, over claims that its young stars were portrayed in a sexualised way.

The film is directed by French-Senegalese director Maïmouna Doucouré, and started streaming on 9 September. More than 200,000 tweets with the hashtag #CancelNetflix became the top trending topic one day later.

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I’m Covid vulnerable: dare I do my bit to save our cinemas?

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Britain’s beleaguered picture palaces desperately need bums back on seats. But some filmgoers have to consider the risks more than others

Lockdown in the UK cost its cinemas an estimated £111m in lost revenue, and their annual income could be down 60% on last year’s. Abandoned filming means there are few enticing titles in the pipeline, and production safety guidelines are hampering new production. If cinemas are to survive while socialdistancing slashes their capacity, they’ll have to fill as many as they can of their remaining available seats.

Filmgoers will need to show up in force, whatever their age, gender or physical condition. I’m an ardent film fan; unfortunately, I’m also male and medically vulnerable, which makes me low-hanging fruit for Covid’s scythe. An over-75-year-old is 623 times more likely to die from the disease than an under-45-year-old. Men are over twice as much at risk as women, and a dodgy cardiovascular system doesn’t improve your chances.

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Diana Rigg: star with an independent streak to match her glamour

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From kick-ass screen roles to award-winning theatre and TV ones, with a curious sideline in nuns, the Yorkshire-born actor’s class and spirit earned her a magnificent career

When Diana Rigg made her Broadway debut in 1971, the theatre programme Playbill introduced her in terms that established the wide range of work and appeal that still marked her career at her death today, five decades later, at the age of 82.

The then-31-year-old Yorkshirewoman, theatregoers were told, was “a highly established star of the theatre, motion pictures and films in England” who had recently “become popular in the United States as the glamorous Emma Peel in The Avengers television series and as the leading lady in the latest James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”.

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Diana Rigg, Avengers and Game of Thrones star, dies aged 82

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Actor who played Emma Peel in hit spy series and James Bond’s only wife was diagnosed with cancer in March

The actor Diana Rigg, known for her roles on stage and in film and television – including The Avengers and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – has died at the age of 82.

Rigg, who rose to prominence in the 1960s through her starring role as Emma Peel in The Avengers alongside Patrick Macnee, enjoyed a long and varied career, playing Lady Olenna Tyrell in HBO’s smash hit Game of Thrones, a show she admitted in 2019 that she had never watched. She also played Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, or Tracy Bond, James Bond’s first and only wife to date, in the 1969 film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

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Oscars reveal new diversity requirements for best picture nominees

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Nominees must satisfy two of four key standards addressing onscreen and offscreen representation

The Oscars are raising the inclusion bar for best picture nominees, starting with the 96th Academy Awards in 2024.

In a historic move, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Tuesday laid out sweeping eligibility reforms to the best picture category intended to encourage diversity and equitable representation on screen and off, addressing gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and disability.

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Sun Children review – Iranian street kids strike gold

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Majid Majidi’s cast of young toughs digging for treasure under a school deliver a heart-rending story with unexpected depth of emotion

Sun Children, by the Iranian director Majid Majidi, gives us a prison-break drama that is escaping to nowhere, and a knockabout school comedy gone horribly wrong. The acting is broad, the plot gears often creak, but it has guts and heart and a grubby, street-smart charisma. It’s one of the finest films playing in this year’s Venice competition.

Dedicated to “the 152m children forced into child labour”, this casts 12-year-old Roohollah Zamani as Ali, the pint-sized boss of a gang of thieves, a miniature wheel inside a much bigger machine, working for an unnamed local crime boss who skulks on the rooftop amid his pigeon coops. The boss wants Ali to retrieve a hoard of unspecified treasure, which is either buried in the local graveyard or in the drainage pipe that runs beside it. And the only way he can do it is to go back to school.

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Disney remake of Mulan criticised for filming in Xinjiang

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Film credits offer thanks to eight government entities in region where rights abuses are alleged

Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan, already the target of a boycott, has come under fire for filming in Xinjiang, the site of alleged widespread human rights abuses against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.

The film, directed by Niki Caro, is an adaptation of Disney’s 1998 animation about Hua Mulan, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to fight in the imperial army in her father’s stead.

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The problem with Mulan: why the live-action remake is a lightning rod for controversy

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The remake of Disney’s hit animation has triggered pro-democracy and human rights protests in Hong Kong and around the world

It’s an understatement to say that a lot has happened since the trailer for Disney’s live-action Mulan was released last year, shortly after Hong Kong’s draconian national security law was passed without consultation or vote in June. The ongoing assault on democracy in Hong Kong has dominated international headlines, with the arrests of pro-democracy activists, newspaper editors and government legislators. With its original cinema release put on hold due to the coronavirus epidemic, Mulan is now emerging to a vastly different political landscape.

On the face of it, the new Mulan is a missed opportunity for Hollywood to explore Chinese history and identity, a confused and superficial statement about Chinese nationalism. A hodgepodge of Chinese historical mise-en-scène, wuxia-style choreography, cheap orientalism and stilted dialogue, it’s also become a lightning rod for pro-democracy and human rights protests around the world.

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Greta Thunberg says Venice documentary shows her real self

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Global climate activist pleased with film’s portrayal of her as a ‘shy nerd’

A documentary following Greta Thunberg and her journey from Swedish schoolgirl to global climate activist accurately portrays her as a “shy nerd”, the teenager said as the film premiered at the Venice film festival.

Director Nathan Grossman recorded Thunberg’s everyday life for a year, chronicling her rise to fame from the beginning of her school strike outside the Swedish parliament in August 2018 to her trips around the world demanding that political leaders take action to fight the climate crisis.

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Pro-democracy boycott of Disney’s Mulan builds online via #milkteaalliance

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Liu Yifei, who stars as Chinese heroine, has voiced support for Hong Kong police during suppression of protests

Calls to boycott Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan have been reignited ahead of its release on Friday, with Thai pro-democracy activists joining those vowing to shun the film.

Controversy over Mulan erupted last year, when its star, Liu Yifei, voiced support for police in Hong Kong, who have been accused of using excessive force against protesters.

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Batman star Robert Pattinson ‘tests positive for Covid-19’

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Actor will reportedly self-isolate as Warner Bros halts UK production of The Batman

The actor Robert Pattinson has tested positive for Covid-19, according to US media reports, halting production of the film The Batman just days after it resumed following lockdown.

A spokesperson for Warner Bros, the Hollywood studio behind the film, said: “A member of The Batman production has tested positive for Covid-19, and is isolating in accordance with established protocols. Filming is temporarily paused.”

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Cate Blanchett says she would rather be called an actor than an actress

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Venice film festival jury chief backs Berlin event’s move towards gender-neutral prizes

The Hollywood star Cate Blanchett has said she would rather be called an actor than an actress.

The Australian, who is heading the jury at the Venice film festival, gave her backing to Berlin festival’s controversial decision last week to do away with gendered prizes and only give a best actor award.

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Star Wars actor John Boyega says non-white roles are ‘pushed to the side’ in franchise

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British actor, who played former stormtrooper Finn, says the process had changed him and made him ‘angry’

The British actor John Boyega has criticised the treatment of non-white characters in the latest Star Wars films, saying they were marketed as important elements in the franchise but were ultimately “pushed to the side”.

In an interview published by GQ magazine on Wednesday, Boyega expressed bitterness over how his role as stormtrooper Finn faded in the latter episodes of the trilogy which concluded with The Rise of Skywalker in 2019.

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The Mole Agent: the story of the most unusual documentary of the year

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An 83-year-old goes undercover in a Chilean nursing home in a warm-hearted and surprising look at age and intimacy

With The Mole Agent, Maite Alberdi set out to make a film noir documentary about a spy in a nursing home. She did not expect it to transform into an aching meditation on isolation and loneliness.

The Chilean film-maker told the Guardian she was initially toying with genre and form. In early scenes, she makes you question whether you’re even watching a documentary because of the heightened noir aesthetic – venetian blinds and high contrast lighting.

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‘Our superhero’: black British figures praise Chadwick Boseman

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Tributes to groundbreaking star come from spheres of film, TV, sport and politics

Chadwick Boseman has been widely praised for breaking down cultural boundaries and inspiring a generation of young black people, following news of his untimely death.

The Black Panther star died at his home in the Los Angeles area aged 43, four years after being diagnosed with colon cancer. He was best known for his role as the regal T’Challa in the Marvel cinematic universe, the franchise’s first high-profile black superhero.

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Anbessa review – heart-rending tale of a boy living on the edge

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An irresistibly charismatic farm boy, displaced by a housing development on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, is the star of this affecting documentary

The American director Mo Scarpelli makes a miraculous discovery in her new documentary – a 10-year-old Ethiopian farm boy who has been displaced from his home by urbanisation. Scarpelli has said that when she spotted Asalif Tewold on the street in Addis Ababa, she knew instantly that she wanted to make a film about him. You can see why. A charismatic kid with energy and imagination, he’s at that perfect stage of boyhood with an appetite for adventure and make-believe. That said, Scarpelli’s observational film-making style, slow and lingering, is a challenge and likely to be off-putting to all but hardcore lovers of arthouse.

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Face masks, time travel and James Bond auditions: discuss Tenet with spoilers

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Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster creates a palindromic origami of bizarre physics inside an 007-style thriller. If you’ve seen it, what did you think?

Charged with the twin missions of kickstarting cinemagoing post-lockdown (outside the US, at least) and out-Nolanning every previous Christopher Nolan movie, Tenet carries a lot on its shoulders. The fact that it made it into cinemas is an achievement, but does it deliver? The critical consensus has been a qualified, often confused, “yes”, although opinions have differed widely, even among Guardian and Observer critics. One thing all will agree: as well as a fresh jolt of spectacle to revive the flatlining movie business, Tenet provides plenty to talk about and plenty to think about. Too much? Let’s talk about that.

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Tenet review – supremely ambitious race against time makes for superb cinema

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Go with it, and Christopher Nolan’s high-concept action romp will leave you ripping off your face mask for air, even as you wonder what it was all about

Who shall save cinema? Not James Bond apparently. There’s been a brand-new Daniel Craig spectacular ready to go since Easter, arguably just the thing to get punters’ actual bums back on actual seats. But Team 007 is wimping out, unwilling to splurge their product irreversibly into some potential new ruinous lockdown – and Disney has suffered a comparable bottle-loss, dumping its live-action version of the Mulan legend on to streaming services.

So it’s up to the mighty Christopher Nolan to take the heroic, morale-boosting gamble and open his big new film in cinemas. Tenet is a gigantically confusing, gigantically entertaining and gigantically gigantic metaphysical action thriller in which a protagonist called The Protagonist battles cosmic incursions from the future while time flows backwards and forwards at the same time. There’s a 747 plane that crashes into a warehouse and then uncrashes back out of it, for reasons that are not immediately obvious.

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How Julia Louis-Dreyfus roasted Donald Trump in DNC finale – video

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Actor Julia Louis-Dreyfus brought a great deal of levity while hosting the final night of the Democratic national convention. The comedian and star of Veep roasted Donald Trump and urged Americans to vote this November, joking that not even 'Facebook, Fox News and Vladimir Putin' can stop the democratic process

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Filmmakers told to ditch sex scenes to protect actors from coronavirus

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Updated guidance suggests directors take inspiration from classic films made when sex on screen was prohibited

British film and TV directors are being encouraged to seek inspiration from classic romances such as Casablanca and ditch depictions of sex altogether when planning intimate scenes under new guidelines for directing during the Covid-19 crisis.

Directors UK, the professional association for screen directors in Britain, suggested some creative alternatives to avoid sex scenes with physical interaction while social distancing is required, in an update to its Directing Nudity and Simulated Sex guidelines, which are focused on safe working during the pandemic.

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