Category Archives: Film

‘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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‘You lot can’t rattle me’: John Boyega defends explicit anti-racism posts in wake of George Floyd death

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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.

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Parisians angry as trees in famous cinema’s Japanese garden cut down

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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.

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Fred Willard, much-loved star of Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap, dies aged 86

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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.

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Tom Hardy’s 20 best film performances – ranked!

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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.

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Jerry Stiller, star of Seinfeld and father of Ben, dies aged 92

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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.

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Conservation society clashes with Disney over missing historic letters

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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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Julie Andrews: ‘I was certainly aware of tales about the casting couch’

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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.

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Sleazy bosses, exploited barmaids: US cinema finally discovers the left behinds

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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).

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Tom Cruise and Nasa in talks over film to be shot in outer space – reports

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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.

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I’ve never seen … The Terminator

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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.

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