The film Richard Jewell promotes the trope that women sleep their way to the top. It’s sexist, insulting – and nonsensical
Sign up for The week in patriarchy, a newsletter on feminism and sexism sent every Saturday.
Continue reading...Category Archives: Film
Danny Aiello, Do the Right Thing star, dies aged 86
Oscar-nominated character actor made his breakthrough in Moonstruck and appeared in The Godfather Part II
Danny Aiello, the veteran character actor best known for roles in The Purple Rose of Cairo, Do the Right Thing and Moonstruck, has died aged 86. According to TMZ, his family confirmed Aiello had died in hospital on 12 December after an infection.
Born in 1933, Aiello grew up in the south Bronx, living with his five siblings and mother after his father had left the family. After serving in the army, working as a bus driver and a nightclub bouncer, Aiello turned to acting in his mid-30s, with his first significant role, as a New Jersey barman in Louis LaRusso’s 1975 play Lamppost Reunion.
Continue reading...The Kingmaker review – exquisitely horrible portrait of Imelda Marcos
The former first lady of the Philippines is revealed as a monstrous, loathsome, absurdly queenly figure in Lauren Greenfield’s superb documentary
Lauren Greenfield’s film about the Philippines’ former first lady Imelda Marcos reveals a grotesquely self-pitying, wholly unrepentant and very rich woman, who has clearly still kept her hands on a great deal of the American aid money that successive US presidents once gave the Philippines in return for suppressing communism and civil rights and showing hospitality to US naval power – cash that she and her husband, Ferdinand, looted from the public purse and salted away abroad.
Related: 'She's an unreliable narrator': Lauren Greenfield on her Imelda Marcos documentary
Continue reading...Phoebe Waller-Bridge: I was not hired for Bond because of my gender
Fleabag creator says she was never told 007 script role was to help with female characters
Phoebe Waller-Bridge will be only the second woman ever credited on a Bond movie script but she has insisted gender was not the reason she was hired.
The Fleabag creator said it was “mad” and “exciting” to work on No Time to Die, in which Daniel Craig will play 007 for the final time. But there was never a conversation about her being there to help with the film’s female characters.
Continue reading...Hobnails, drill and boot camp: secrets of Sam Mendes’s war epic 1917
Director tells how getting every detail right was crucial to helping his cast understand emotions of war
Wasted youth, random violent death and the folly of armed conflict are the big themes of 1917, Sam Mendes’s orchestral symphony of a first world war film. But for the director and the team who made it alongside him, no detail was too small to consider.
“It was very important, the question of historical accuracy,” said Mendes. “We had two very fine historical advisers, Andy Robertshaw and Peter Barton, who are world renowned. And one military adviser, Paul Biddiss, who was also brilliant.”
Continue reading...The Cave review – horror and hope in a Syrian hospital battered by war
This powerful, immensely moving documentary follows the courageous medical staff who must treat injured children as bombs fall around them
Feras Fayyad, the young Syrian documentary-maker who filmed Last Men in Aleppo (and was himself imprisoned and tortured by Bashar al-Assad’s regime), returns with a chilling, shaming film made over two years inside a Syrian hospital in Ghouta, the city besieged by the Syrian government for five years until 2018.
If there is a chink of hope here it’s Amani Ballour, the hospital’s manager, a paediatrician in her late 20s. “I know this life is tough. But it’s honest,” she says. Her deep sense of purpose is humbling – it carries her through hellish days treating dozens of bloodied and badly injured children. Her gentleness with patients is desperately moving, too.
Continue reading...Aladdin star Mena Massoud: ‘I haven’t had a single audition since film was released’
As the Disney movie earns $1bn at the global box office, the actor says ‘I feel like I’m going to be overlooked and underestimated for a long time’
Mena Massoud, the Egyptian-Canadian actor who played Aladdin in the recent Disney live-action remake, has said he hasn’t had a single audition since its release.
Massoud told the Daily Beast: “I’m kind of tired of staying quiet about it … I want people to know that it’s not always dandelions and roses when you’re doing something like Aladdin. ‘He must have made millions. He must be getting all these offers.’ It’s none of those things. I haven’t had a single audition since Aladdin came out.”
Continue reading...And the 2019 Braddies go to … Peter Bradshaw’s film picks of the year
Ahead of the launch on Tuesday of the Guardian’s films of the year countdown, our critic selects his personal choice of the movies, directors and performances of 2019
• The Braddies are listed in alphabetical order, rather than ranked in terms of merit
Once again, the awards season comes to its climax with my “Braddies” for the calendar year, a selection of my personal awards that exists entirely independently of Guardian Film’s best-of-the-year countdown.
As ever, there are 10 “nominees” in 10 categories: film, director, actor, actress, supporting Actor, supporting Actress, documentary, cinematography, screenplay, directorial debut. There is also the single-entry nomination in the special category: quirkiest future cult classic most likely to beoverlooked by the boomer MSM establishment. The nominees are listed in alphabetical order and readers are invited to vote below the line for their preferred winner – and complain about omissions.
Continue reading...Syrian war documentary For Sama triumphs at British independent film awards
The chronicle of an activist who filmed the destruction in Aleppo wins prizes for best film, documentary, director and editing
For Sama, the acclaimed documentary about life under siege in the Syrian city of Aleppo, has unexpectedly triumphed at the British independent film awards, winning the top prize, best British independent film, as well as best documentary and best director for Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts.
Described by the Guardian’s Mike McCahill as a film to “break your heart and sear your soul”, For Sama is a chronicle filmed by Syrian activist-director al-Kateab as Aleppo is targeted during the country’s ongoing civil war. Al-Kateab spends much of the time in a hospital where her husband, Hamza, works, recording the destruction and horror. For Sama won a total of four Bifas, including best editing – previously announced with other Bifa “craft” awards on 15 November.
Continue reading...Atlantics review – poetic Dakar love story
A prosaic script lets down Mati Diop’s visually arresting, ghostly first feature
Although set in suburban Dakar, this beguiling debut feature from Mati Diop is a film that walks between worlds. The story is woven in the hinterland amid wealth and poverty, love and expediency, this life and the supernatural. It’s silkily enigmatic and unpredictable, and certainly unlike anything else you will see this year.
It took me a second viewing to engage with the tonal shifts of the story of Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), promised in marriage to a wealthy man, but who loves Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore), a construction worker who disappears at sea in search of a better life. Diop has a keen eye for a poetic image: the film opens with a shot of bustling streets dwarfed by the monstrous, looming haunch of a half-built tower. Later, there’s an achingly pensive shot of the sleeping quarters of the men who have left, their beds still rumpled from warm bodies; bottles of Victory aftershave primed for a night out that will never come. But the lyricism of the photography by Claire Mathon is not matched by the screenplay, which Diop co-wrote with Olivier Demangel and which seems rather flat and declamatory next to the eerie magic of the film’s gauzy light.
Continue reading...‘A very nice guy’: how Godfrey Gao made it to the top
The late film star was a trailblazer for diversity in fashion and film. His loss deprives the growing Chinese entertainment industry of a fine talent
Taiwanese-Canadian actor Godfrey Gao was famous for being the first Asian international supermodel but he was much more than just a pretty face – he had a reputation for being one of the friendliest stars in an intensely competitive industry.
“He was known for being a very nice guy,” says Cecilia Pidgeon, a former celebrity editor at GQ China. “He had a very good reputation among other actors. He was always nice to his fans. All of the colleagues he worked with only had good things to say.”
Continue reading...Archive of blood: how photographer Letizia Battaglia shot the mafia and lived
Her shocking pictures told the truth about mafia murders – and earned her death threats. Ahead of a powerful film about her extraordinary life, we meet the woman who dared to confront killers. Warning: contains graphic imagery
Letizia Battaglia can still remember the first corpse she photographed: a man lying beneath an olive tree in a field in rural Sicily. It remains a viscerally unsettling image, made all the more so by its telling details: the dead man’s shoeless left foot, the resigned gaze of the policeman guarding the body, the olive leaves hanging low over the spreadeagled torso. The fact that he was a mafioso murdered in a local feud is, insists Battaglia, neither here nor there. “Everyone,” she says quietly, “is equal in death.”
What has stayed with her, over 40 years later, is the smell that hung in the summer air that day and was carried on the breeze. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days,” she says, drawing deeply on a cigarette. “Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”
Continue reading...Sacha Baron Cohen: Facebook would have let Hitler buy ads for ‘final solution’
In wide-ranging speech, actor accuses tech giants of running the ‘greatest propaganda machine in history’
Read Sacha Baron Cohen’s scathing attack on Facebook in full
Sacha Baron Cohen has denounced tech giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google as “the greatest propaganda machine in history” and culpable for a surge in “murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities”.
Baron Cohen was speaking on Thursday at Never Is Now, the Anti-Defamation League’s summit on antisemitism and hate in New York, where he was presented with the organisation’s international leadership award. He said that “hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities” and that “all this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history”.
Continue reading...Real Madrid: film festival puts city’s forgotten district on map
Residents of the Cañada Real, Europe’s largest shantytown, are hoping the 16kms festival will challenge the area’s fearsome reputation for drug dealing and poverty
Just 15 minutes from the centre of Madrid lies Europe’s largest shantytown: 16km of thousands of houses, shacks and tents lining the roaring M-50 motorway. The Cañada Real has been the Spanish capital’s forgotten neighbourhood for decades, both thriving and suffering in the city’s blind spot.
This multicultural community is home to about 7,300 people living in six sectors – but it is Sector 6 that has given it its somewhat fearsome reputation. Here, drug addicts shuffle along listlessly as the dealers flag them – and passing journalists – down to offer cannabis, cocaine and heroin.
Continue reading...The Banker: Apple abruptly cancels premiere of its first major film
Company says there were ‘concerns’ surrounding the film, which was scheduled to premiere Thursday
Apple has caused a stir by abruptly canceling the world premiere of its film The Banker at the AFI Festival in Hollywood on Wednesday.
Related: Apple hopes its new streaming service will make a splash
Continue reading...Alan Alda: ‘It’s amazing that most of us live as if we’re not gonna die’
The former M*A*S*H star has Parkinson’s disease – but remains optimistic. He talks about his new film, Marriage Story, how actors can help heal political division and working with Woody Allen
‘Would you like a beer?” asks Alan Alda, tall and elegant in black raincoat, grey jacket and blue jeans as he walks through his offices near the Lincoln Center in New York. The actor, director and science communicator warmly greets Einstein, a female half bernese mountain dog, half border collie. “Smartest dog I ever met,” Alda’s assistant later observes.
The urbane 83-year-old star of M*A*S*H, The West Wing and The Aviator settles in a glass-walled meeting room, acknowledges that we are here to talk about his new film, Marriage Story, but says he is happy to talk about anything. Over the next hour, he will discuss God, mortality, his mother, podcasting, science, Woody Allen and how he is, so far, unbowed by Parkinson’s disease.
Continue reading...Disney+ attaches warnings of ‘outdated cultural depictions’ to classic films
The new streaming service has added the disclaimer to some of its best-known movies, including Dumbo and Lady and the Tramp
Warnings have been added to a number of classic Disney films playing on the recently launched Disney+ streaming service that they may contain “outdated cultural depictions”.
Users of the service have seen the warnings attached to some of the company’s best-known animated films, such as Dumbo, Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp, with text that reads: “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”
Continue reading...Charlie’s Angels review – ramshackle action reboot goes at half throttle
There’s intermittent fun to be had in this throwaway relaunch of the female secret agent franchise but the party is cut short by incoherent action and a clunky script
Back in 2000, the glossy relaunch of Charlie’s Angels felt like a genuine pop culture event. The central casting of Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu, all at the height of their fame, was an impressively inspired get. The accompanying lead single from Destiny’s Child was not only a smash hit but a deserved one. The gaudy aesthetic and post-Matrix bullet time action were laughable but also undeniably of the moment. It was the most 2000 film released in 2000, and at the time it was impossible to avoid – a slick, pre-packaged blockbuster received with as much enthusiasm as it was made. Almost 20 years, one sequel and one failed TV series later, the franchise is back, but all that buzz has been replaced with something else: deafening silence.
Related: Elizabeth Banks: ‘My film is loaded with sneaky feminist ideas’
Continue reading...The new heart-throbs: how Hollywood embraced east Asian actors, from Henry Golding to Simu Liu
From romcoms to Marvel blockbusters, east Asian actors are enjoying unprecedented success. What’s taken the film industry so long?
It was the moment that all romance fans look forward to at the end of a film, hearts bubbling with anticipation: the kiss. I was watching The Edge of Seventeen, a smart coming-of-age movie, in which Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) had rushed to see her awkwardly endearing classmate (Hayden Szeto). After a bungled date and a crush on another man, she had decided Erwin was the one she wanted.
And then, instead of any show of passion, there came … an affectionate pat on the back as he introduced her to his friends. Moments before, I had been delighted that a Canadian actor of Chinese descent had been cast as the love interest of a white American woman. As the credits rolled, I felt cheated.
Continue reading...Woman accuses Roman Polanski of raping her in 1975 when she was 18
Film director denies claim by Valentine Monnier about alleged incident at ski resort
A Frenchwoman has accused Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski of raping her in a Swiss ski resort when she was a teenager.
It is the latest accusation against the Polish-born director who fled from the US to France in 1978 after admitting the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl.
Continue reading...