Vivek Oberoi movie will tell ‘true story’ of reprisals after February attack in which 40 Indian troops were killed
Bollywood is to make a movie based on the “true story” of Indian air strikes on Pakistan this year, its producer said, the latest patriotic film to hit the silver screen.
The 26 February attack took place after a suicide bombing claimed by a militant group based in Pakistan killed 40 Indian troops on 14 February in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
Continue reading...The 25th outing for the superspy is called No Time to Die, which brings up a number of different theories
It has been a long road to get to the title of Bond 25. For a while the film was variously rumoured to be Eclipse (too generic), A Reason to Die (too much like low-hanging fruit for bored critics) and Shatterhand (too much like a worryingly graphic description of someone trying to manually catch their own diarrhoea). But now, finally, the truth is out. The next James Bond film will officially be called No Time to Die.
Related: No Time to Die: 25th James Bond film gets a title
Continue reading...Canal Productions alleges Chase Robinson accrued enormous hotel and Uber bills as well as watching TV during working hours
Chase Robinson, who until recently held a senior role in Robert De Niro’s film production company, has been sued by her employer for $6m.
According to Variety, who have seen papers filed in a state court on Saturday, Robinson – whose most recent position was vice-president of production and finance at Canal Productions – is accused of embezzling money and wasting time during office hours watching television shows.
Continue reading...Son of Henry Fonda and brother of Jane Fonda died after battling lung cancer, family says
The actor Peter Fonda has died at the age of 79 following a battle with lung cancer, his family has said.
Fonda, who co-wrote, produced and starred in the classic 1969 road movie Easy Rider, died peacefully at his home in Los Angeles on Friday, his family said in a statement.
Continue reading...Crystal Liu, the lead in Disney’s live-action remake, voiced support for police in the city
Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan is facing calls for a boycott after its star voiced support for police in Hong Kong.
Crystal Liu, also known as Liu Yifei, reportedly posted a message on the Chinese social media site Weibo, which translated as: “I also support Hong Kong police. You can beat me up now.” In English, the post added: “What a shame for Hong Kong.”
Continue reading...The illustrated city: Its main arts institution may be sinking, but the city’s influence on artists and thinkers from Carrington to Trotsky cannot be so easily erased
Continue reading...As the country seeks to establish itself as a space power, audiences are developing an appetite for the extraterrestrial on the big screen
In 2014, India sent the Mars Orbiter Mission into space, and became the first country to send a satellite to orbit the planet at its first attempt – putting its much richer regional rival China in the shade as it became the first Asian nation to get to the red planet. The project was notable for being led by a team of female scientists; as is India’s second lunar probe, Chandrayaan-2 (from the Sanskrit for “moon craft”), which was launched last month and is due to land on the moon in early September. And as the country establishes itself as a space power, Indians have developed an appetite for sci-fi themes in its cinema.
The patriotic outburst that followed the Mars mission has fuelled the latest example of Indian space cinema: Mission Mangal (Sanskrit for Mars), a fictionalised account of the Orbiter Mission. Starring and produced by Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar, it is due for release on 15 August, India’s Independence Day. “I would follow the news about India’s space missions and feel proud of what we were achieving,” says Kumar. “But through Mission Mangal I guess you could say I have an insider’s perspective.”
Continue reading...Woody Harrelson is the latest person to share his embarrassing story of meeting the reality TV star before he became president
If you think it’s bad enough sharing a planet with Donald Trump, spare a thought for poor Woody Harrelson. Because according to the man himself, Harrelson once shared a dinner table with the president, and it went just as well as you would expect. In a recent Esquire interview, Harrelson deployed a Trump anecdote for the ages.
In 2002, then Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura invited Harrelson to “a brutal dinner” at Trump Tower, because Trump was trying to convince Ventura to be his 2004 Democratic running mate. Over two and a half hours, Harrelson, Ventura, Trump and his fiancee, Melania Knauss, enjoyed each other’s company. Except Harrelson had a terrible time. Here’s how he described it:
Continue reading...The defining battle of the Vietnam war is now the subject of the film Danger Close. Harry Smith recalls the afternoon that changed his life
If he dwells on it, Lt Col Harry Smith can still see, vividly, the blood on the trees on the enemy’s escape path. There was so much blood. In the days after the three savage hours that was the battle of Long Tan, his soldiers were finding body parts, carnage and corpses spread across the battlefield. But it was that blood, “the blood of all the others that were dragged away, wounded, suffering”, that affects him the most. “That worries me more than a dead body.” In the eerie silence, in the pervasive gloom, among the smell of the dead in the Long Tan rubber plantation, latex ran down trees punctured by bullets and mingled with the blood.
Long Tan had been a battle fought against almost impossible odds. A ferocious battle, a defining action of the Vietnam war. On the afternoon of 18 August 1966, a single infantry company of 108 mostly inexperienced Australian and New Zealand soldiers engaged with a regiment of 2,500 battle-hardened Viet Cong and North Vietnam army troops. Almost surrounded, outnumbered 10 to one, they withstood Viet Cong attacks in cyclonic rain.
Continue reading...This sombre, angry documentary captures a sense of ordinary life in the strip bordered by Egypt, Israel and the sea
Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell’s heartfelt film about the unending misery of Gaza – now effectively a blockaded strip of land bounded by the Egyptian and Israeli borders and the Mediterranean Sea – has had a complex reception in some quarters since it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Some have found it manipulative and politically reticent, in that it only fleetingly mentions Hamas, and includes footage of an Israeli bombardment but shows only stone-throwing as the response. There may be something in this. For instance, eyebrows have to be raised at the moment when an immobile child is shown with her eyes closed, we are encouraged to think she is dead but in a later scene she opens her eyes.
Yet the film has real value as a compassionate human document, in showing ordinary people who courageously have to keep going somehow, in the grimmest of conditions, in a world where, as someone puts it, there is a “wall between the people of Gaza and life itself”. A young woman practises the cello, a young man records rap tracks, a theatre director rehearses a performance piece, a fisherman broods over the oppression of his industry – they are not allowed to fish more than three miles out, and the amount of fish that can be caught so close to shore is pitifully meagre. The sea is what the people of Gaza face: the one boundary that does not seem so brutal, something that should conceivably be a source of comfort, but is almost as unforgiving as the land barriers. A sombre, angry film about a people under political siege.
Continue reading...Fast & Furious stars’ contracts ensure they receive equal punishment on screen, says producer
Egocentric demands are nothing new on Hollywood sets but producers of the Fast & Furious franchise have revealed its stars have gone so far as to refuse to lose fights against one another.
Members of the team behind the movie series told the Wall Street Journal (paywall) that actors including Jason Statham, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Vin Diesel have contract demands that limit the amount of punishment their characters take in fights.
Continue reading...CGI-weary audiences’ demand for complex ‘real’ action is increasing the risk for performers
This week, the British stunt performer Joe Watts suffered a serious head injury on the set of the film Fast & Furious 9, at Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden, Hertfordshire, after he reportedly fell 30ft (9 metres) from a balcony. He was airlifted to hospital and has been put in an induced coma. Production on the film was shut down, and the Health and Safety Executive is investigating.
Stunt professionals are in high demand in the current climate of action-driven blockbuster films and increasing volumes of small-screen productions requiring cinema-standard action. Weary of unconvincing CGI and green-screen action, audiences are starting to want practical, unsimulated effects: humans doing spectacular stunts “for real”. However, as the volume and complexity of stunts has grown, so has the risk factor.
Continue reading...One of the stars of last year’s breakout hit Succession, the actor is getting used to being recognised in the US. He talks about juggling success with family life – and why he’s starring in a film about electricity
Matthew Macfadyen was idling on the stoop of his boutique Manhattan hotel last month when a man walked past and said warmly: “I loved you in Billions.” Macfadyen, at 44, is one of the handful of male British actors on US TV – among them Benedict Cumberbatch, Dominic West and the actor for whom Macfadyen was mistaken, Damian Lewis – whom to American eyes can appear indistinguishable. “Thank you!” he replied, cheerfully. (Macfadyen is extremely polite, and inclined to be grateful for any recognition at all.) “Then he came back two minutes later and said: ‘Succession! So sorry.’” He roars with laughter.
Tom Wambsgans, the role Macfadyen plays in Succession, is robustly against type. In the 14 years since he played Darcy to Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, Macfadyen’s career has leaned heavily towards period drama. He did Anna Karenina and Little Dorrit. When the pilot script for Succession reached him, he had just played Mr Wilcox in the BBC adaptation of Howards End. Tom, the ambitious, oleaginous husband to an Elisabeth Murdoch-type heiress was as far from these foppish roles as Macfadyen could get, a gift even before the show took off. “I thought: ‘I don’t know if this is going to have a life and I don’t know where the characters are going to go. But it’s clever and farcically funny.’” At the very least, he thought, “it’ll show I can do an American accent”.
Continue reading...Dutch actor renowned for his role as cyborg Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s sci fi epic, was equally at home in Hollywood and European cinema
Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor best known for his role as cyborg Roy Batty in seminal sci-fi film Blade Runner, died at the age of 75. His website announced the news, saying that Hauer had died on Friday “after a very short illness… Rutger passed away peacefully at his Dutch home”.
Director Guillermo del Toro was among those paying tribute, calling him “an intense, deep, genuine and magnetic actor that brought truth, power and beauty to his films”.
Continue reading...This ruminative collection of vignettes steeped in everyday reality was inspired by newspaper accounts of bizarre tragedies
Not a Bond film. In Damien Hirst’s celebrated creation, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was a tiger shark suspended in a tank. In this brief, ruminative piece from Thai film-maker Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, that impossibility is something else – it’s the formaldehyde that the shark’s floating in, or that we’re all floating in, or it’s the banal glass tank itself, or it’s the people milling around the artwork in the gallery, peering at it, shrugging, and then leaving to get on with their day.
This feature is a collection of short stories or realist vignettes, based on or otherwise inspired by newspaper stories about tragic or bizarre deaths. A story about a female student killed by a truck that careered off the road – a woman who, just a few moments before, had been hanging out with her friends in a hotel room and had volunteered to step out to get beer – is dramatised with a simple scene showing the ordinary, undramatic, untragic hanging out: chatting, laughing. Later, a maid silently comes to clean the empty room.
Continue reading...Marvel Studios sequel has earned $3bn since its release in April, breaking 10-year record
Avengers: Endgame has surpassed Avatar to become the highest-grossing film of all time.
The Marvel Studios sequel, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, earned over £2.3bn ($2.9bn) in revenue by Sunday, since being released in April. Avatar, directed by James Cameron, which was released in 2009, previously held the record as the highest grossing movie of all time , earning $2.79bn.
Continue reading...Natasha Lyonne used her starring role in Orange is the New Black to shake off her demons and reinvent herself. The actor and director talks about third chances, crosswords and being the class rebel
In a busy Manhattan restaurant, Natasha Lyonne is eating chicken hearts and talking about resurrection. Her own. “And I had to forgive myself for wasting so many years, instead of punishing myself for this… misshapen life.” You don’t so much interview Lyonne, I quickly learn, as herd her conversations like existential sheep. It is a precise chaos – she has a lot to say and is aware of the many limits of time. Her voice crackles across the busy restaurant – she moves like Joe Pesci as a Simpsons character. A waiter interrupts with a second plate of glistening meats: “Madam, more hearts?” “In many ways, I did think I was going to die.” He makes briefly frantic eye contact with me, then disappears. “So now I’ve had to think, what is the most honest way that I can live? That feels the least like a lie? That means I’m less likely to self-destruct all over again?”
Lyonne has been acting since she was six, first in adverts “for dolls that don’t exist any more”, then with directors including Woody Allen, and in hits such as American Pie, before being hospitalised in 2005 with hepatitis C, a heart infection and a collapsed lung, and undergoing methadone treatment under the smirking glare of New York’s paparazzi. And some years later, having slowly worked her way back into the public eye (with the help of her best friend Chloë Sevigny, who vouched for her sobriety) she rose again.
Continue reading...Dozens more injured after ‘man threw liquid and set fire’ to building, police say
Japan has been plunged into a state of shock after an arson attack on an anime studio left at least 33 people dead and dozens injured in the country’s worst mass murder in nearly two decades.
The perpetrator, who was also injured and has been taken into police custody, walked into the 1st Studio building of Kyoto Animation in Fujimi ward, Kyoto, at about 10.30am. He poured what is suspected to be petrol in multiple areas of the building before igniting it.
Continue reading...R&B star announces numerous African pop and rap stars on album out Friday, as well as Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams and daughter Blue Ivy
Beyoncé has outlined details for her 14-track new album to accompany The Lion King remake, entitled The Lion King: The Gift, to be released on Friday. The album features four new solo songs alongside collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams, Childish Gambino, Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy and more. It is separate from the soundtrack to The Lion King, though the Beyoncé song Spirit appears on both. The singer voices the character Nala in the new 3D-animated version of the 1994 Disney classic.
Related: The Lion King review – deepfake copycat ain't so grrreat
Continue reading...Star clarifies comment: ‘Any actor should be able to play anybody and Art, in all forms, should be immune to political correctness’
Scarlett Johansson has said comments she made on the “authentic casting” debate have been taken out of context and asserted that she supports diversity in film.
Related: Scarlett Johansson drops out of trans role after backlash
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