Category Archives: Film

Woody Allen’s new film to open San Sebastián film festival

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Rifkin’s Festival, which was shot in the Spanish city last year, chosen to headline annual film festival

Rifkin’s Festival, the new film by Woody Allen, has been selected to open the San Sebastián film festival in Spain.

Starring Elena Anaya, Louis Garrel and Gina Gershon, Rifkin’s Festival was shot in and around the city in 2019, and according to the plot synopsis takes place during the festival itself. “It tells the story of a married American couple who go to the San Sebastián festival and get caught up in the magic of the event, the beauty and charm of the city and the fantasy of movies. She has an affair with a brilliant French movie director, and he falls in love with a beautiful Spanish woman who lives there.”

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Richard Dreyfuss: ‘I was a bad guy for a number of years’

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His life has been a rollercoaster ever since Jaws. Richard Dreyfuss talks about Hollywood hell-raising, cocaine burnout, his flirting heyday – and the trouble with #MeToo

“Don’t shoot, I win Oscar.” These words, says Richard Dreyfuss, are printed on the shirt he’s wearing under his grey jacket. He is at home in San Diego, reclining in a voluminous brown leather armchair. Behind him is a picture of his wife, Svetlana, resting on a shelf beside his Bafta and David di Donatello awards. His Oscar he keeps inside his fridge (“I didn’t want to brag, but I wanted everyone to know”).

The strange story behind “Don’t shoot, I win Oscar” will be told, but only after Dreyfuss asks Svetlana to do some Googling. “I think the best way to do it is Marlene Dietrich,” he tells her. “Her first film. And then it’ll show the name of the guy.”

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The UK film industry has to change. It’s blatant racism | Steve McQueen

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The Oscar-winning director of 12 Years a Slave reflects on lack of diversity in TV and film and says now is the time for real change

Last year, I visited a TV-film set in London. It felt like I had walked out of one environment, the London I was surrounded by, into another, a place that was alien to me. I could not believe the whiteness of the set. I made three films in the States and it seems like nothing has really changed in the interim in Britain. The UK is so far behind in terms of representation, it’s shameful.

My first film production in the UK in 12 years is Small Axe, six films commissioned by the BBC about black experience from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s. We tried very hard on Small Axe: we created our own training scheme with one trainee per department. But, in terms of heads of departments, it was just myself and a couple of other people who were black British.

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Ian Holm, star of Lord of the Rings, Alien and Chariots of Fire, dies aged 88

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The versatile actor went from the RSC and Harold Pinter to international movie stardom with roles as the hobbit Bilbo Baggins and an android in Alien

Ian Holm, the versatile actor who played everything from androids to hobbits via Harold Pinter and King Lear, has died in London aged 88, his agent confirmed to the Guardian.

“It is with great sadness that the actor Sir Ian Holm CBE passed away this morning at the age of 88,” they said. “He died peacefully in hospital, with his family and carer,” adding that his illness was Parkinson’s related. “Charming, kind and ferociously talented, we will miss him hugely.”

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Abandoned bus made famous by movie Into the Wild removed by Alaska authorities

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Helicopter removed the bus where adventurer Christopher McCandless died of starvation in 1992, to prevent others trying to reach it

An abandoned bus in the Alaska back country, popularized by the book Into the Wild and movie of the same name, was removed on Thursday as a public safety measure, state officials said.

The bus has long attracted adventurers to an area without cellphone service and marked by unpredictable weather and at-times swollen rivers. Some have had to be rescued or have died. Christopher McCandless, the subject of the book and movie, died of starvation there in 1992.

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Sushant Singh Rajput, Bollywood star, dies aged 34

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Tributes for the ‘bright young actor’ flow from colleagues, cricketers and India’s prime minister

Popular Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput was found dead at his Mumbai residence on Sunday, police and Indian media reports have said.

Initial reports, citing police sources, said the 34-year-old’s body was found in his apartment in suburban Bandra.

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‘The older I get, the less I fear’: meet the Italian Larry David

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A decade after his two much-loved comedies about the vicissitudes of ageing, director Gianni Di Gregorio explains why, against his own expectations, he had to make another

In 2000, after a decade of caring for his ailing mother in her large flat in Rome, Gianni Di Gregorio wrote a comedy about a bloke called Gianni who looks after his 93-year-old mother in a large flat in Rome. No one was interested in the story, in which the unemployed bachelor ends up running around after a cohort of old ladies whose spirit and vigour remain undimmed despite various ailments. Everyone thought he was crazy: who would be interested in a funny film about four old women and a middle-aged bloke?

Related: Gianni Di Gregorio: The incidental director

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Catherine Deneuve was Johnny Hallyday’s secret love, book claims

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Revelation that celebrated actor was late rocker’s ‘Lady L’ takes France by surprise

More than two years after his death, the French rocker Johnny Hallyday is still causing sparks between the women in his life.

The late star, a notorious womaniser, is at the centre of a love-triangle spat over claims the actor Catherine Deneuve was his lifelong soulmate and a factor in his split with his first wife, the singer Sylvie Vartan.

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How Hollywood has tried, and mostly failed, to tackle police racism

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From Birth of a Nation to Watchmen, the big and small screens have tried to wrestle with racial tensions within law enforcement with mixed results

As we’ve all seen, when it comes to American police brutality, the gloves are now off and the masks too. Faced with yet more incontrovertible evidence of brutal and racist policing – both the killing of George Floyd and others, and some forces’ response to the public protests – it has become virtually impossible to maintain the image of American law enforcement officers as straightforward protectors and servers of the people. 

Related: George Floyd protests: fired officer to appear in court as calls to defund police sweep US – live

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Cate Blanchett suffers chainsaw accident on lockdown in East Sussex

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The actor has sustained a ‘nick to the head’ in what she told former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard was a minor incident

Cate Blanchett has sustained a cut to the head following a chainsaw accident at her home in East Sussex.

The Oscar-winning actor, who relocated from Sydney to Crowborough last year, was asked how lockdown was going by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard on her podcast last week.

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‘Show respect and listen’: scenes from Australia’s first Indigenous-run police station

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Amid growing global civil unrest against police brutality and racism, a small station 330km west of Uluru is trying things differently

As protests against police brutality and racism have spread around the world in the wake of the death of George Floyd, two new films demonstrate the extremes of police dealings with Indigenous Australians.

The first, which surfaced earlier this week, is the now notorious mobile phone footage of a violent encounter between a New South Wales police constable and an Aboriginal teenager in Surry Hills, Sydney.

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‘These women aren’t victims’: director turns the spotlight on garment workers

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Based on true stories, Rubaiyat Hossain’s Made in Bangladesh challenges stereotypes while revealing the relentless pressure of fashion’s supply chain

Rubaiyat Hossain’s latest film, Made in Bangladesh, opens with a scene of pure, visceral panic: young garment workers trapped in a burning factory. Alarms blare, women scream and smoke fills the stairwells.

“A fire or a building collapse is every garment worker’s greatest fear,” says Hossain. When filming the scene, the women seen desperately running for their lives didn’t need much direction. 

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History remixed: the rise of the anachronistic female lead

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The lives of women from history, from Catherine the Great to Shirley Jackson, are being brought to the screen with a radical focus on character over facts

It is a point in favor of TV’s sprawling proliferation that one gets, in the course of a year, both a lush, serious historical drama starring Helen Mirren as Catherine the Great on HBO, and its tonal opposite, Hulu’s raucous, gleefully brutal The Great, which puts an asterisk right on the title card: “An Occasionally True Story.” The Great, developed by Tony McNamara, the writer of absurd court send-up The Favourite, cares little for the historical accuracy of the 18th-century Russian monarch. Its Catherine (Elle Fanning) arrives in the backward, hedonistic Russian court as a naive 19-year-old bride in 1761. The real Catherine was 35 and a mother by then, but that’s fine – free from the constraints of biography or pedantic seriousness, The Great’s occasional truth delivers, ironically, a more lasting impression of a real, flesh and blood princess – one slowly but determinedly amassing power, enlightened but ambitious to rule.

Related: The Great review – gleefully garish new series from The Favourite writer

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Taika Waititi awarded Queen’s birthday honour for services to film

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Actor and director is made an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit and joins more than 170 New Zealanders on the list

Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi has been honoured on New Zealand’s Queen’s birthday list for services to film.

The 44-year-old Māori man who hails from the east coast of the North Island has been made an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

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Tributes paid to Boys from the Blackstuff actor Michael Angelis

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Writer Jack Thorne among those to pay their respects to Angelis, who has died aged 68

Tributes have been paid after the death of Michael Angelis, an actor who will be remembered as the morose rabbit-obsessed Lucien from The Liver Birds, the desperate Chrissie in Boys from the Blackstuff, and the narrator of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Angelis died suddenly while at home with his wife on Saturday, his agent said. He was 68.

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Yesterday credits row shows trouble’s never far away in film writing

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Jack Barth’s claim he did not receive credit he deserved shines light on movie industry machinations

As a premise, it is surprisingly simple: a young musician who is the only person in the world to know the Beatles’ back catalogue forges a successful career by covering their songs. But the more complex question of who should get credit for the Hollywood movie it became has put the opaque machinations of the film industry in the spotlight.

The idea ultimately became Yesterday, the Richard Curtis film directed by Danny Boyle and starring Himesh Patel, which made more than £125m at the box office worldwide. But Jack Barth, a writer whose work has appeared on The Simpsons, claimed last week he had not received the full credit he said he deserved for writing the original screenplay that provided the basis for the film.

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Cook Off, the no-budget romcom that became the first Zimbabwean film on Netflix

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Shot in the chaotic last days of Robert Mugabe’s regime, Cook Off is a feel-good tale of resilience and hope

A Zimbabwean film about a woman who enters a TV cooking show and which cost only $8,000 to make has become the first feature from the country to make it onto Netflix.

“Seeing myself on Netflix, I have to punch myself every day. Like, is that really me?” asked actress Tendaiishe Chitima, star of Cook Off, which has now been acquired by the streaming giant.

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‘Demand is huge’: EU citizens flock to open-air cinemas as lockdown eases

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From Berlin to Madrid the movies are back, albeit with hygiene and distancing restrictions

As Madrid’s spring evenings warm into summer nights, cinema-goers are parking up to watch Grease. In Munich, they are taking al fresco seats to follow the adventures of a communist kangaroo with a penchant for boozy chocolates, and in Prague they are witnessing a croaky vigilante work out some profound childhood traumas.

As Europe begins to stir from its Covid-19 lockdown, people bloated by two-month boxset binges have a new way to feed their entertainment needs as they emerge, blinking, into the daylight. Or, rather, the twilight.

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‘Do I really care?’ Woody Allen comes out fighting

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The 1992 accusation that the film-maker sexually assaulted his young daughter has made him a pariah, yet he was never charged. In this exclusive interview, he explains why he is done with treading carefully

When Woody Allen was 20, the writer Danny Simon taught him a few rules about comedy, the most important of which was this: always trust your own judgment, because external opinion is meaningless.

Allen recounts this tale in his recently published memoir, Apropos of Nothing. That this book exists at all is proof that he still adheres to that rule. These days, Allen’s name is mud, a fact made clear by the critics, who wrote their reviews with one hand while holding their noses with the other.The New York Times’ critic wrote: “Volunteering to review [this book], in our moral climate, is akin to volunteering for the 2021 Olympic javelin-catching team.” Another publication’s headline was: “I Read Woody Allen’s Memoir So You Don’t Have To.”

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