The Star Wars actor expanded on his defiance of racist social media users in an Instagram Live video
John Boyega has been praised for a series of uncompromising social media posts speaking out about racism in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.
Boyega’s initial Tweet, “I really fucking hate racists”, currently has 1.3m likes, but came in for criticism for his hard-hitting tone and use of an expletive.
Continue reading...Property magnate Charles Cohen’s €8m renovation of La Pagode branded a ‘massacre’
When the property magnate Charles Cohen bought the La Pagode cinema in Paris, complete with its celebrated Japanese garden, three years ago, he announced that as an American in Paris he wanted “everyone to be happy”.
The cinema-loving Francophile promised to “restore and preserve” the magnificent listed building and pledged he would “not disappoint” with his €8m facelift.
Continue reading...Willard, whose career was reinvigorated by his work on the mockumentaries of Rob Reiner and Christopher Guest, was a beloved and ubiquitous presence in US comedy
Fred Willard, an actor whose career was dotted with innumerable indelible cameos playing genial buffoons in unfortunate roles of authority, has died aged 86.
The news was first broken by Jamie Lee Curtis, the wife of Christopher Guest, in whose mockumentaries – including Best in Show and A Mighty Wind – Willard won a new army of fans.
Continue reading...The actor’s latest movie, Capone, further builds upon his beefy and menacing screen presence, but there is another side that shines through in some of Hardy’s great roles
There aren’t as many mockney-geezery roles in Tom Hardy’s career as you might think, although he has a turn in this and also in Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake, in which he plays one of the lackadaisical members of a crew run by Daniel Craig’s icily professional cocaine dealer. In Guy Ritchie’s notorious gangster drama he plays Handsome Bob, a bit of a lairy bastard, with a secret emotional life, who works with Idris Elba. The film set my teeth on edge, but Hardy brings some of his trademarked truculent charisma.
Continue reading...Comedian who formed a popular duo with his wife, Anne Meara, has died of natural causes
The comedian Jerry Stiller has died at the age of 92. His death was announced on Monday on Twitter by the actor Ben Stiller, who called him “a great dad and grandfather, and the most dedicated husband”.
Jerry Stiller enjoyed a long career on stage and screen, often accompanied by his wife, Anne Meara, with whom he formed a popular comedy act. They met in 1953, married the following year and regularly teamed up for improv sketches, performing in Las Vegas nightclubs and on The Ed Sullivan Show and other TV programmes, often in character as the squabbling spouses Mary Elizabeth Doyle and Hershey Horowitz, playing upon their Irish Catholic and Jewish cultures. In 2010, they took their act online, performing from the front room of their New York apartment. Meara died in 2015.
Continue reading...Campaigners call for return of 1930s wording to Twentieth Century Fox Film Co former offices
Disney, titan of the media and entertainment world, has enraged a group of Londoners attempting to preserve one of Soho’s best-known squares. And the battle is over one word: “Fox”.
In the south-west corner of Soho Square stands Twentieth Century House, a grand emblem of the American film industry’s key role in this part of the city since 1937. It is now in the hands of Disney.
Continue reading...The celebrated actor had a turbulent upbringing before becoming world-famous for playing two perfect nannies. Now she’s bonding with a new generation of children through her storytelling podcast
“I’ll tell you what, shall I go outside?” Julie Andrews asks. We are talking by phone, but, alas, the reception inside her home on Long Island is, she says, “always terrible”. Torturous minutes pass in which I can hear only fragments of her conversation, and if anyone knows of a sweeter agony than being barely able to hear Andrews’ still lovely, melodious voice, I don’t want to know what it is. Eventually, I have to tell her this phone conversation isn’t working.
“I can stand out in my garden, although it is a bit nippy …” Andrews suggests.
Continue reading...From The Assistant to Support the Girls, American cinema is swapping feelgood escapism for gritty unsettling realism. We talk to the women spearheading this new wave
‘I wanted it to be relatable to any woman who’s ever worked in an office,” says Kitty Green of her new film The Assistant. “Everything in the film has been in the press already. But I wanted to take viewers on an emotional journey, so they could empathise with the character.”
The #MeToo saga has been examined to near exhaustion, but The Assistant manages to add something new. Rather than perpetrators or victims, it focuses on a relative bystander: a young office worker at a New York film production company. We follow this character, played by Julia Garner, through her demeaning routine: commuting in before daybreak, photocopying, printing, taking her male co-workers’ lunch orders, clearing up leftover pizza from the meeting room (as the men come in for the next meeting, she is humiliatingly caught with a crust in her mouth).
Continue reading...Elon Musk reportedly involved in the production, which if confirmed would be first feature film ever made in space
Tom Cruise is in talks with Nasa about working on a movie shot in outer space, according to the head of the space agency.
“Nasa is excited to work with Tom Cruise on a film aboard the Space Station!,” Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote on Twitter.
Continue reading...For years, I have been the self-professed biggest Terminator fan on the planet. There’s only one problem...
I bonded with my best university buddy over many things: student radio, bland pasta, failing to talk to girls at parties, and the paradoxes of time travel, notably in the Back to the Futures, the Bill & Teds, Quantum Leap and the Terminators. In classic best friend one-upmanship, neither of us claimed to be any cop at talking to girls at parties, but both claimed to be the bigger Terminator fan. With every new Terminator movie since, I’ve dragged said mate to the cinema and sat with childlike, open-mouthed delight through an average-at-best film. I’m not sure why I like Terminator so much. I don’t know much about politics, literature or art. But when it comes to time-travelling robots, I’m a complete sucker.
In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, John Connor and Claire Danes defeat the red leather lady Terminatrix and head off hoping to disable a non-existent Skynet HQ, only to seal their fate in a nuclear bunker. Terminator: Salvation is the one where Christian Bale went ballistic at the director and hasn’t even got Arnie in it, but it does take Terminator 2 down an alternative timeline. And talk of timelines gets me going.
Continue reading...With the widespread closures of cinemas as part of measures to stem the spread of Covid-19, drive-in movie theatres around the world, where social distancing is guaranteed, have been enjoying new-found popularity
Continue reading...This carefully authorised documentary offers glimpses of a dazzling presence on America’s political stage
Michelle Obama is a class act – one of the classiest – and her intelligence and poise now look like something from a lost golden age. The publication of her globally bestselling memoir Becoming in 2018 brought her dazzlingly into the public sphere on her own terms. It gave her an international A-list status to rival her husband’s and provided Democrats and non-Trumpians around the world with a manifesto of decency and dignity to cling on to.
Now we have this watchable, but carefully authorised, behind-the-scenes documentary for Netflix (from the Obamas’ company, Higher Ground Productions) about Obama’s American book tour (with a stopover at London’s O2 Arena). It shows her getting in and out of armoured sports utility vehicles, chatting easily and good-naturedly with her security detail, with colleagues and family members backstage, with beaming celebrity moderators onstage (starting with Oprah Winfrey) and with people getting their copies signed in bookstores who often dissolve in floods of tears just in coming face to face with her. (I was sorry, however, that we didn’t get to see again her amusing cameo in the TV comedy Parks and Recreation, which showed Amy Poehler’s earnest public official Leslie Knope reduced to a gibbering fangirl in her presence.)
Continue reading...The series has delivered a horror masterwork, a seminal shoot-em-up and some auteurist gems ... but how do they rank?
What better way to celebrate the recent Alien Day than to place the eight movies in the long-running space saga into some kind of order of excellence? And also perhaps to ask how so many film-makers have managed to muck up the original film’s formula.
Let’s start at the bottom. The two Alien vs Predator movies from 2004 and 2007 are now remembered largely for their staggering blandness, as if everybody involved had forgotten what made the early films so chilling. Ostensibly B-movies, but lacking the joyful, half-cocked knockabout bombast of a Roger Corman or Ray Kellogg film, they even disappointed fans of the crossover comic books that spawned them. If 20th Century Fox thought it was getting the new Ridley Scott when the studio hired Paul WS Anderson to direct ’s Alien vs Predator they were sadly mistaken. Bringing the xenomorphs to Earth, as Fox had intended to do in 1992 prior to David Fincher’s Alien 3, turned out to be the dumbest move since John Hurt decided to take a closer peek at the funny egg thing on LV-426. Even a smart moment of stunt-casting – Aliens’ Lance Henriksen as Charles Bishop Weyland – couldn’t paper over the cracks of this weirdly bloodless film. Aliens vs Predator: Requiem upped the gore but dropped quality levels even further, with untried music video directors Colin and Greg Strause at the helm. That the saga survived at all after this twin descent into movie purgatory is remarkable in itself.
Continue reading...Family urges fans not to publicly mourn leading man of numerous musical romances
The Indian actor Rishi Kapoor, who built a career as one of Bollywood’s romantic heroes, has died of leukaemia at the age of 67.
Kapoor, part of a famous Bollywood family, was admitted to hospital in Mumbai on Wednesday and died on Thursday, according to a family statement.
Continue reading...The actor has claimed that his famous role in Pride and Prejudice 25 years ago left him typecast and narrowed his acting horizons
Name: Mr Darcy.
Age: 207, 28, 35, 25, depending on how you look at it, really.
Continue reading...Khan, who had a string of Anglo-American successes under his belt, including Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi and Jurassic World, has died in Mumbai
Irrfan Khan, the Indian-born actor who achieved considerable success in both Bollywood and the west, has died aged 53. He had been admitted to the intensive care unit of Mumbai’s Kokilaben hospital on Tuesday with a colon infection.
In March 2018, he revealed he had been diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumour, but after extensive treatment he recovered well enough to shoot Angrezi Medium, the film which would turn out to be his last, and whose release this March was cut short because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Continue reading...Planet of the Humans, which takes aim at the green movement, is ‘full of misinformation’, says one online library
A new Michael Moore-produced documentary that takes aim at the supposed hypocrisy of the green movement is “dangerous, misleading and destructive” and should be removed from public viewing, according to an assortment of climate scientists and environmental campaigners.
The film, Planet of the Humans, was released on the eve of Earth Day last week by its producer, Michael Moore, the baseball cap-wearing documentarian known for Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine. Describing itself as a “full-frontal assault on our sacred cows”, the film argues that electric cars and solar energy are unreliable and rely upon fossil fuels to function. It also attacks figures including Al Gore for bolstering corporations that push flawed technologies over real solutions to the climate crisis.
Continue reading...Becoming, which drops in May, follows the former first lady on her 34-city book tour, will offer a ‘rare and up-close’ look at her life
Netflix has announced a new original documentary focused on former first lady Michelle Obama to be released on 6 May.
Becoming will follow Obama on her 34-city tour to promote her book of the same name and will offer an “intimate”, “rare and up-close” look at her life. It’s directed by Nadia Hallgren, who recently made the documentary short After Maria, which looked at the effect of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rican families.
Continue reading...It’s hard to make much of a mark in the strange, static world of video-conferencing. But we could all learn a trick or two from famous arthouse film-makers, from Jim Jarmusch to Andy Warhol
Of all the many weirdnesses of the age of lockdown, video-conferencing must be one of the weirdest. This is the first time many of us have used Zoom, FaceTime, Google Hangouts and Houseparty. And, invaluable as they are, few would disagree that they are a strange way to communicate. From the stilted family group chat to the strained business meeting, it all feels messy and unnatural. Video-conferencing is nothing like real-life conversation, nor is it like cinema or TV, even though it is essentially watching people on a screen.
However, for a certain strain of film-makers and artists, the unblinking, unmoving gaze of the webcam is familiar territory. Could the art end of cinema help ease our pain and anxiety? Could we improve our new social rituals by rethinking them as experiments in avant garde film?
Continue reading...The writer-director’s comedies – from Office Space to Silicon Valley – always sum up the spirit of their times. So why has he made an LSD-soaked cartoon about George Clinton and Bootsy Collins?
Few writer-directors have been as consistent and ruthless at capturing the moment as Mike Judge, although he never actually intends to do so. “It’s always a shock when something comes out and it feels so relevant,” he says, in his laconic surfer-dude tone, talking to me by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “But I tend to look at stuff that feels as if it’s everywhere, but nobody’s talking about.”
Judge, 57, is so beady at spotting what’s everywhere, his shows themselves end up becoming ubiquitous, the thing everybody’s talking about. It is impossible to imagine 90s TV without his seminal hits, Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, the former satirising the worst of youth culture, the latter fondly depicting gentle American conservatism acclimatising itself to the Bill Clinton era.
Continue reading...