After voicing support for Woody Allen and criticizing cancel culture, Spike Lee apologized on Saturday for words he said were “wrong”.
Related: 'Do I really care?' Woody Allen comes out fighting
Continue reading...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
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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.
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