Polish musician won numerous awards, scored The Exorcist, and was admired by rock stars
Leading composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki has died at the age of 86 after a long illness, his family announced this morning.
The Polish-born Penderecki was a major figure in contemporary music whose compositions reached millions through celebrated film scores, which included for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.
Continue reading...Elephant will launch on Disney+ days after Sussexes step back from being senior royals
The Duchess of Sussex is to narrate a Disney film which documents the journey of a family of elephants across the Kalahari desert in southern Africa, which will launch three days after she and Prince Harry “step back” from being senior royals.
Meghan will voice the Disneynature documentary Elephant, which will be available on Disney+ from 3 April, and is her first major acting role since becoming a royal.
Continue reading...The Saudi Arabian director directed her first film, Wadjda, hiding in the back of a van on the streets of Riyadh. Now her latest, The Perfect Candidate, is opening doors in Hollywood
Haifaa Al-Mansour’s latest film, The Perfect Candidate, opens with a doctor in her 20s driving to work. In any other film you wouldn’t register the fact that she’s behind the wheel. But this woman, dressed in a black abaya and niqab, is in Saudi Arabia, which until 2018 banned women from driving. Al-Mansour added the scene as a punch-the-air moment for female audiences in Saudi Arabia, an invite to a collective whoop of victory. “I know that in the west this seems like common-sense stuff,” she says. “But I think they’ve really helped women to see themselves as an independent people.” She fixes me with an earnest look, to see if I get it. “For younger professional women, it’s huge, because it gives them control over their destiny.”
Al-Mansour is Saudi Arabia’s first female director. In 2011, she shot her debut, Wadjda, hiding in the back of a van. It would have been impossible for a woman to be seen openly on the street giving orders to men. So, she kept out of sight and used a walkie-talkie (“But I’m sure you could hear my voice all over Riyadh. ‘Do that!’ ‘Pull the camera back!’”) The film was gorgeous, a funny, big-hearted story about a gobby 10-year-old girl who would stop at nothing to get her hands on a bike. Al-Mansour shrugged off the death threats (“One of them told me they had a coffin ready for me”). Spend five minutes in her company and you are struck by her optimistic energy.
Continue reading...Box office numbers for drive-in cinemas in Seoul, South Korea, are on the rise as people find a way to avoid crowds during the coronavirus outbreak
Continue reading...Director says in new memoir that not raising his adopted daughter after abuse allegations – which he denies – was ‘one of the saddest things’ of his life
Woody Allen has written that he “would welcome Dylan [Farrow] with open arms if she’d ever want to reach out”, in his recently published memoir Apropos of Nothing.
In extracts published in the New York Times, Allen writes: “One of the saddest things of my life was that I was deprived of the years of raising Dylan and could only dream about showing her Manhattan and the joys of Paris and Rome. To this day, Soon-Yi [Previn] and I would welcome Dylan with open arms if she’d ever want to reach out to us as Moses [Farrow] did, but so far that’s still only a dream.”
Continue reading...The controversial film director’s autobiography Apropos of Nothing had been dropped by its original publisher
Woody Allen’s memoir, dropped by its original publisher after widespread criticism, has found a new home.
The 400-page book, still called Apropos of Nothing, was released on Monday by Arcade Publishing.
Continue reading...Actor is suing paper over claims he was violent and abusive toward ex-wife Amber Heard
Johnny Depp’s libel case against the Sun over allegations he was violent and abusive towards his ex-wife Amber Heard, which was due to begin on Monday, has been adjourned to a later date.
Mr Justice Nicol made the announcement at the high court on Friday. “I have reached the reluctant conclusion that the trial does have to be adjourned,” he said.
Continue reading...Actor and producer Jing Wang acquitted of sexually assaulting woman at the Shangri-La hotel in 2018
A Chinese movie star and producer have been found not guilty of raping a woman inside a Sydney hotel room, ending the near two-year legal saga.
Actor Yunxiang Gao and producer Jing Wang were on Thursday found not guilty of a raft of charges and cleared of sexually assaulting the woman inside the Shangri-La Hotel in the early hours of 27 March 2018.
Continue reading...Now postponed because of coronavirus, A Quiet Place 2 explores a world untethered by fear. Its star discusses parenthood, in film and real life, and her terror of doing SNL
Emily Blunt and her husband, John Krasinski, devised a rigorous self-care regime when the pair were making A Quiet Place, 2017’s harrowing self-isolation horror hit. “I always say that Macallan 12 sponsored A Quiet Place,” says Blunt. “John and I would just go home and drink a lot of whisky every night. And that sort of continued on A Quiet Place 2.”
You, too, might need a tumbler of scotch while watching the film. Blunt describes it as a “runaway train that grips you by the neck”, which is half-right. It also takes that neck and lays it on the tracks before running over it repeatedly. “I realised what an investment people had in this family from the first film,” says Blunt. “Everyone asked: ‘What happens next?’”
Continue reading...Kate Beckinsale claims disgraced movie mogul was enraged when she wore white suit rather than ‘tight dress’ to New York premiere shortly after 9/11
Kate Beckinsale has described an obscenity-filled rant by Harvey Weinstein in which he allegedly called her “stupid fucking cunt” after he objected to her choice of outfit for a film premiere in 2001.
In a post on social media, Beckinsale outlined events after a screening for the romcom Serendipity, in which she starred opposite John Cusack. She said Weinstein insisted on holding the premiere only a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, calling it “the most insensitive, tone deaf, disrespectful idea possible”. Beckinsale said Weinstein had arranged for her to visit his home with her two-year-old daughter, and then launched a tirade at her when they were alone.
Continue reading...Centre for the Moving Image proposes 11-floor building with screens, learning spaces and auditorium
The organisation behind the Edinburgh film festival has submitted a planning application for a £50m film centre that would be the first of its kind in the UK.
The Centre for the Moving Image has proposed an accessible and environmentally sustainable 11-floor building that it says would be a focal point for Edinburgh’s film community.
Continue reading...The veteran actor, best known for his collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, as well as roles in Star Wars and Hannah and Her Sisters, has died
•Peter Bradshaw on Max von Sydow: an aristocrat of cinema who made me weep
•A life in pictures
Max von Sydow, the Swedish actor who made his name in a series of landmark films with Ingmar Bergman before progressing to international stardom, has died in France. He was 90.
Related: Max von Sydow: god of gravitas
Continue reading...The most popular symbol of the radical left in Germany is an avowed anti-capitalist and a firm believer in collective property. He takes down neo-Nazis with the same bouncy energy as he tackles property speculators.
Books expounding his views, running at several volumes, top the German bestseller charts; posters bearing his face are currently plastered all over the country’s cities.
Continue reading...Author Stephen King has hit out at publisher Hachette over its decision to drop publication of Woody Allen’s memoir after a protest from his son, the author Ronan Farrow, prompted a walkout of staff at the publishing group’s New York office last Thursday.
“The Hachette decision to drop the Woody Allen book makes me very uneasy,” King, the horror writer, said on Twitter. “It’s not him; I don’t give a damn about Mr Allen. It’s who gets muzzled next that worries me.”
Continue reading...Harvey Weinstein’s record of sexual attacks and harassment against women dates back to the 1970s in a “lifetime of abuse” in which he “trapped women into his exclusive control and assaulted or attempted to assault them”, according to New York prosecutors.
In a note to the New York supreme court released on Friday ahead of Weinstein’s sentencing next week, the lead prosecutor at his rape trial essentially threw the book at the fallen movie mogul. Without providing the state’s desired sentence, Joan Illuzzi-Orbon urged Judge James Burke to impose “a sentence that reflects the seriousness of [his] offenses, his total lack of remorse for the harm he has caused, and the need to deter him and others from engaging in further criminal conduct”.
Continue reading...Hachette has dropped plans to publish a memoir by Woody Allen, the Oscar-winning film director who has been accused of sexually abusing his daughter.
“We take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly,” the publishing company said in a statement.
Continue reading...New Zealand Oscar winner to develop animated show based on the beloved Roald Dahl book
The Academy Award-winning director Taika Waititi has signed a deal with Netflix to write, direct and produce two animated series based on the works of the children’s author, Roald Dahl.
The entertainment giant said Waititi’s collaboration with Netflix would be “based on the world and characters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, while the second series would be a “wholly original take” on the Oompa-Loompas, the diminutive and mysterious workers who dispense chocolate, and sometimes cautionary advice, at Willy Wonka’s factory.
Continue reading...From ‘Wuhan-400’, the deadly virus invented by Dean Koontz in 1981, to the plague unleashed in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, novelists have long been fascinated by pandemics
According to an online conspiracy theory, the American author Dean Koontz predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 1981. His novel The Eyes of Darkness made reference to a killer virus called “Wuhan-400” – eerily predicting the Chinese city where Covid-19 would emerge. But the similarities end there: Wuhan-400 is described as having a “kill‑rate” of 100%, developed in labs outside the city as the “perfect” biological weapon. An account with more similarities, also credited by some as predicting coronavirus, is found in the 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic that jumps from animals to humans and spreads arbitrarily around the globe.
But when it comes to our suffering, we want something more than arbitrariness. We want it to mean something. This is evident in our stories about illness and disease, from contemporary science fiction all the way back to Homer’s Iliad. Even malign actors are more reassuring than blind happenstance. Angry gods are better than no gods at all.
Continue reading...Director’s films ‘propaganda against the system’, judges reported to have declared – but coronoavirus outbreak casts doubt on whether he will accept summons to prison
Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian director who won the the top award at last month’s Berlin film festival, has been ordered to serve a one-year prison sentence over his movies, his lawyer has said.
Rasoulof’s sentence arose from three films that Iran’s authorities found to be “propaganda against the system”, his lawyer Nasser Zarafshan told the Associated Press. The sentence also included an order than he stop film-making for two years, the lawyer said.
Continue reading...The self-produced film by faith leader Ryuho Okawa is woefully misjudged and reveals the laughable reality behind Happy Science
Here’s a biopic about a world-changing faith leader, a man who has published 2,500 books – according to his website – including accounts of his seances with the ghosts of world leaders. (Available to buy on Amazon: Margaret Thatcher’s Miraculous Message – An Interview with the Iron Lady 19 Hours After Her Death.) If you’ve never heard him, Ryuho Okawa is the founder and CEO of Happy Science, a religious movement that claims to have 11 million followers worldwide; some call it a cult. Now Okawa has executive-produced a long and incredibly leaden drama about himself written by his daughter, Sayaka.
If you’re going to make a film about yourself called Immortal Hero, hiring an actor with knee-wobbling charisma should be your number-one priority. But lead Hisaaki Takeuchi plays a self-help author called Makoto Mioya – an obvious stand-in for Okawa – with a blank-faced and catatonic presence. When he’s rushed to hospital after a heart attack, Mioya is told he won’t make it through the night. But he miraculously cures himself with the power of his mind. It turns out that Mioya has been visited his entire life by celestial spirits (they look like flickering holograms from an 80s kids’ TV series). Now these spirits command him to fulfil his destiny as the chosen one by unifying world religions. So Mioya abandons the self-help racket and branches into the lucrative business of religion.
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