Category Archives: Drama films

Paolo Taviani, acclaimed director of classic Italian films, dies aged 92

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The film-maker, who won the Palme d’Or for 1977’s Padre Padrone, was a towering presence for more than three decades, creating politically engaged works with his brother Vittorio

The Italian film-maker Paolo Taviani, whose gritty biopic Padre Padrone won top prize at the Cannes film festival, has died aged 92, Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, said on Thursday.

For more than three decades Taviani and his brother Vittorio formed one of cinema’s greatest directorial duos. “Paolo Taviani, a great maestro of Italian cinema, leaves us,” Gualtieri said on X. The brothers “directed unforgettable, profound, committed films which entered into the collective imagination and the history of cinema”, Gualtieri added.

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Tributes paid to ‘wonderful’ drama teacher Anna Scher, who has died at 78

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Kathy Burke and Daniel Kaluuya among alumni of her London school, credited with making stars of often working-class students

Tributes have been paid to Anna Scher, an influential drama teacher who taught actors including Kathy Burke, Daniel Kaluuya and Adam Deacon, after the announcement of her death on Sunday, aged 78.

Scher, who had taught children in north London to act for more than 50 years, has been credited with creating numerous stars, and was known for championing people from a working-class background. The Anna Scher Theatre (AST), which started as a drama club in January 1968, has a long list of well-known alumni, including Pauline Quirke, Linda Robson, Martin Kemp, Natalie Cassidy, Patsy Palmer, Sid Owen, Jake Wood, Reggie Yates and Brooke Kinsella.

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Literary satire American Fiction takes Toronto film festival’s top award

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Cord Jefferson’s story of a novelist (Jeffrey Wright) grappling with the publishing industry’s expectations of black writers is now practically guaranteed serious Oscar consideration

American Fiction, the literary satire starring Jeffrey Wright as a novelist grappling with the publishing industry’s expectations of black writers, has won the Toronto international film festival’s influential People’s Choice award, a result that practically guarantees it serious Oscar consideration and contention for major awards.

Described by the Guardian as “hilarious and withering”, American Fiction triumphed over pre-festival favourites such as Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers and Hayao Miyazaki’s final film The Boy and the Heron, which were named the runners-up. It is written and directed by Cord Jefferson, a credited writer on TV shows including The Good Place, Watchmen and Station Eleven, and now making his feature directing debut.

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Venice film festival picks starry films despite actors’ strike

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Hollywood films vying for Golden Lion include Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, with non-competition films by Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater

The Venice film festival appears to have largely shrugged off issues caused by non-attendance of Hollywood actors due to the Sag-Aftra strike as it unveiled its lineup for its 2023 edition.

Venice has traditionally functioned partly as a platform for major American releases looking for strong positioning in the autumn awards season, and it has already seen its originally announced opening film Challengers, a tennis drama starring Zendaya, drop out after it was forced to delay its release date.

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Ang Lee casts son Mason to play Bruce Lee in biopic

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The Oscar-winning director’s 32-year-old son has been training for three years for the role

Ang Lee has cast his son Mason Lee as Bruce Lee in a new biopic.

The Oscar-winning film-maker of Life of Pi and Brokeback Mountain has taken on a project that has already seen four writers deliver different versions of the script. The latest rewrite will come from the Oscar-nominated Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman.

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Spielberg’s The Fabelmans wins Toronto film festival People’s Choice award

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Director’s most autobiographical film to date picks up audience prize generally seen as indicator of awards success to come

Steven Spielberg’s new film The Fabelmans has won the Toronto international film festival’s People’s Choice award, long regarded in the film industry as a key indicator of awards success over the next few months.

The Fabelmans, directed by Spielberg and co-written with Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner, has been hailed as Spielberg’s most autobiographical film and has won generally admiring reviews. The story of a teenage boy coping with his parents’ disintegrating marriage in the 60s midwest, the Guardian described it as a “rare insight into the world’s most famous director who has usually kept us at arm’s length”.

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Blonde: first trailer for ‘disturbing’ Marilyn Monroe biopic released

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Netflix film, which has been called ‘startling’ by source author Joyce Carol Oates, stars Ana de Armas as the tragic actor

The first trailer has launched for Blonde, Netflix’s controversial biopic of Marilyn Monroe.

Directed by Andrew Dominik, best known for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the film stars Ana de Armas as the tragic star and is based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize.

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The Duke review – Jim Broadbent steals show in warm-hearted 60s-set crime caper

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Roger Michell’s final feature retells story of the cussed Newcastle pensioner who stole a Goya portrait in protest at government spending priorities

For what has become his final feature film, director Roger Michell made this sweet-natured and genial comedy in the spirit of Ealing, which bobs up like a ping pong ball on a water-fountain. It is based on the true story of Kempton Bunton, the Newcastle bus driver who in 1965 was had up at the Old Bailey for stealing Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery. The mystery of its disappearance had so electrified the media that there was even a gag about it in the James Bond film Dr No, using a copy personally painted by the legendary production designer Ken Adam, which was itself stolen. Maybe there should be a film about that as well.

The court heard this was Bunton’s protest at government misuse of taxpayers’ money (the painting had been saved for the nation at some cost) and to publicise his demand for pensioners to be given free TV licences. (This film features the usual “historical coda” sentences over the closing credits, and one sentimentally records that free TV licences for the over-75s were finally introduced in 2000. But no mention of these being taken away again in 2020.)

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Audrey Hepburn’s 20 greatest films – ranked!

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On the 65th anniversary of Funny Face, we run down the Givenchy girl’s best moments – from upstaging her (usually much older) leading men to literally representing heaven in a dazzling white cable-knit

This exotic MGM romance directed by Hepburn’s then husband, Mel Ferrer, was in fact her first big flop. Anthony Perkins plays a Venezuelan refugee whose life is saved by Rima the jungle girl: Hepburn in a suede pixie tunic, accessorised with a pet fawn and backed by a supporting cast in brownface.

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The Chaperone review – dishing dirt in well-turned hats and hair

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Semi-true story from Julian Fellowes sets churchgoing Kansas lady the challenge of keeping the girl about to become Louise Brooks in line in 1920s New York

Written by Julian Fellowes, who brought us Downton Abbey and recent series The Gilded Age, and directed by Michael Engler, who worked on both the aforementioned, this based-extremely-loosely-on-fact costume drama adapted from a novel by Laura Moriarty should hit the sweet spot for fans of Fellowes’ particular variety of saucy-soapy period pieces. Like so much of Fellowes’ work, it effectively flatters the viewer by assuming he or she must be familiar with certain historical figures (in this case, early cinema star Louise Brooks) and then appears to dish the dirt on them through the eyes of a character from another class or at least different social sphere.

Here, that parallax view is from the perspective of Norma – played by Lady Grantham herself, Elizabeth McGovern, taking a lead role for a change. When first met in 1922 in Wichita, Kansas, Norma seems like a nice, churchgoing lady of a certain age, respectably married to a lawyer (Campbell Scott) and mother of two practically grownup sons. When she hears that local pianist Myra Brooks (Victoria Hill) is in search of a chaperone to accompany her precocious but exceedingly talented teenage daughter Louise (Haley Lu Richardson) to New York to attend a prestigious dance school, Norma mysteriously jumps at the chance. Turns out she has a good reason: she was actually raised in an orphanage there for a short while before being adopted by kindly midwestern farmers, and now wants to find her birth parents.

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Rimini review – Ulrich Seidl’s lounge singer is so horrible, he may be brilliant

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The Austrian director torments everyone, including the audience, in this grotesque tale set in the Italian resort out of season

Wretchedness, sadness and confrontational grotesquerie once again come together in a movie by Ulrich Seidl, although it’s leavened by something almost – but not quite – like ordinary human compassion. If you’ve seen Seidl’s other movies you’ll know what to expect and you’ll know to steel yourself for horror. Perhaps this one doesn’t take Seidl’s creative career much further down the road to (or away from) perdition, but it is managed with unflinching conviction, a tremendous compositional sense and an amazing flair for discovering extraordinary locations.

The Italian coastal resort of Rimini in winter is an eerie, melancholy place; Seidl shows it in freezing mist and actual snow. Refugees huddle on the street and some groups of German and Austrian tourists take what must be bargain-basement package vacations at off-season rates in the tackiest hotels. It is here that Ritchie Bravo, played by Seidl regular Michael Thomas, plies his dismal trade. He is an ageing lounge singer with a drinking problem, a cheery, bleary style, an Islamophobic attitude, a bleached-blond hairdo of 80s vintage and a spreading paunch. Ritchie makes a living crooning to his adoring senior-female fanbase, who show up in their coach parties to catch his act. (You could compare him to Nick Apollo Forte in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose or Gerard Dépardieu in Xavier Giannoli’s The Singer – except much, much more horrible.) He also tops up his income by having sex with some of the fans for money – truly gruesome scenes in the starkly unforgiving Seidl style.

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Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy review – a triptych of light-touch philosophy

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Ryusuke Hamaguchi brings a gentle warmth to this ingenious collection of three stories united by themes of fate and mystery

Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a Japanese film-maker whose work I first encountered in 2018 with his doppelgänger romance Asako I & II and indirectly via last year’s experimental chamber-piece Domains, whose screenwriter Tomoyuki Takahashi has worked with Hamaguchi. Now he has unveiled this ingenious, playful, sparklingly acted and thoroughly entertaining portmanteau collection of three movie tales.

Their themes and ideas are emerging as keynotes for this director: fate and coincidence, identity and role-play, and the mysteries of erotic pleasure and desire. There is a rather European flavour in the mix – one of its characters is a specialist in French literature – and I found myself thinking of Emmanuel Carrère and Milan Kundera. And although there is no formal connection between the stories (other than the thematic echoes) the simple act of juxtaposition creates something pleasingly cohesive.

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Bollywood’s new affair: the film bringing complexity to screen infidelity

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With an all-star cast led by Deepika Padukone, Gehraiyaan aims to bring a fresh realism to its love story. She and director Shakun Batra assess the risks they’re taking

“I think it’s pretty fresh for an Indian audience,” says Deepika Padukone of her new movie, Gehraiyaan (“Depths”). “The way this story has been told, and the way in which it explores infidelity is certainly very new.” Gehraiyaan’s promotional material isn’t hiding anything, with clips showing Padukone’s character Alisha losing herself in clinches with her illicit lover Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi), her cousin’s fiance. If that wasn’t messy enough, Alisha also has a perfectly nice boyfriend of six years, Karan (Dhairya Karwa), who’s done nothing to deserve this betrayal.

“She feels stuck,” is how Padukone explains her behaviour. A 30-year-old yoga teacher in Mumbai, Alisha seems like an otherwise likable and pleasant human being, and the film dwells closely on how conflicted she is. “She feels like she’s been with this one person for so many years. And now, you know, she is at a stage in her life where she feels stuck.”

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Jane Campion: the uncompromising New Zealander kicking down doors in Hollywood

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The film-maker is the first woman to be nominated twice for the best director Oscar – but thanks to her example, others will surely follow soon

The nomination of Jane Campion for best director at the 2022 Academy Awards – her second, following her 1994 nomination for The Piano – is more noteworthy for what it says about the institution than for its validation of the 67-year-old director, absent from feature film-making for more than a decade.

To date, only two women – Kathryn Bigelow and Chloé Zhao – have ever won best director. If that sounds unreasonable, consider this: in 93 years, just seven women have even been nominated for the award – Lina Wertmüller in 1977 (for Seven Beauties), Campion in 1994, Sofia Coppola in 2003 (for Lost in Translation), Bigelow in 2010 (for The Hurt Locker), Greta Gerwig in 2018 (for Lady Bird), Emerald Fennell in 2021 (for Promising Young Woman) and Zhao that same year, victorious with Nomadland. For the first half-century of the awards, double-X chromosomes and the ability to successfully oversee a motion picture were apparently believed to be irreconcilable. (Something to consider the next time the rightwing media complains about Hollywood’s liberal bias.)

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Ballad of a White Cow review – engrossing Iranian death penalty thriller

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In a suspenseful film that quietly builds tension, a widow battles her in-laws after her husband is executed and meets a new man

A woman outside a jail in Tehran asks to see her husband. Visiting hours have finished, the guard tells her. The woman pleads: “He’s about to be executed.” Inside, her husband looks up as she walks into his cell, silent, despairing. As the door slams shut, the camera is left staring at the closed door, listening to the woman’s agonised sobs. So begins this restrained Iranian drama about her fight for justice. It’s a film that quietly builds tension, almost suffocating by the end. Made in the austere Iranian tradition, the style is spare, no soundtrack, little to no camera movement – but with a real intimacy between the characters and screen.

Maryam Moghaddam (who also co-directs) plays Mina: one year after her husband Babak’s execution, she is blandly informed by an official that he has been exonerated – the real murderer has been identified and arrested. It’s all been a terrible mistake, everyone is sorry. But there is nothing to be done. “After all, it was God’s will.” As a widow living alone, Mina is powerless. Her late husband’s brother bullies her to move in with the family. Reading between the lines he would like to marry her and his father appears to want to get his hands on the blood money due to Mina as compensation. When she refuses, they threaten her with a custody battle over her daughter Bita (Avin Poor Raoufi), who is deaf.

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Belle review – anime that makes for an intriguing big-screen spectacle

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This weird postmodern drama sees a lonely teenager join a virtual world where she becomes a hugely successful singer

There’s some amazing big-screen spectacle in this weird postmodern emo photo-love drama from Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosoda, whose previous film Mirai elevated him to auteur status. Suzu, voiced by Kaho Nakamura, is a deeply unhappy and lonely teenager at high school, who lives with her dad. Her mum died some years ago, attempting (successfully) to save a child from drowning and Suzu can’t come to terms with the zero-sum pointlessness of this calamity: a total stranger was saved but her mother died. Or not zero in fact: while her loss increased the sum-total of unhappiness, the most popular boy in school – a friend since they were little – is tender and protective towards Suzu.

Her life is complicated further when she is persuaded to join a virtual reality meta-universe called U, a glittering unearthly city like a next-level Manhattan or Shibuya. (Presumably entry into this fantasy world needs a VR headset, although oddly this is not made plain.) Participants have their biometrics read and get an enhanced avatar of themselves and Suzu finds that she is now “Belle”, an ethereally beautiful young woman with quirky freckles and a wonderful singing voice. To her astonishment, Suzu finds that Belle is becoming a colossally famous singer – but at the very high point of this meta-success she comes across the Beast, who disrupts one of her concerts: a brutish, aggressive outcast figure loathed by the self-appointed vigilante guardians of U.

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Parallel Mothers review | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week

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Pedro Almodóvar’s poetic conviction and creative fluidity flow through this moving baby-swap drama about two single mothers and buried secrets from the Spanish civil war

Not parallel actually: that would mean they don’t touch. Here we have convergent mothers; intersecting mothers whose lives come together with a spark that ignites this moving melodrama, which audaciously draws a line between love, sex, the passionate courage of single mothers, the meaning of Lorca’s Doña Rosita the Spinster and the unhealed wound of Spain’s fascist past. Pedro Almodóvar’s new movie has the warmth and the grandiloquent flair of a picture from Hollywood’s golden age (something starring Bette Davis and Joan Fontaine maybe, with music by Max Steiner) and the whiplash twists and addictive sugar rush bumps of daytime soap.

As ever with Almodóvar, there are gorgeously designed interiors with fierce, thick blocks of Mondrian colour, huge closeups of the female leads and overhead shots of food preparation. It’s impossible to watch this film without just feeling grateful that its director is still so fluent, so creative, still making us a gift of these films. There is a lot going on here, and perhaps the emotions and thoughts spill over the edges of its narrative form. But it would be obtuse not to let yourself travel downstream on this film’s emotional surge.

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Palm Trees and Power Lines review – an unnerving, remarkable debut

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The first feature from Jamie Dack, about a relationship between a 34-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl, boasts a breakout performance for newcomer Lily McInerny

Palm Trees and Power Lines, a remarkably sharp-eyed and bruising debut from writer-director Jamie Dack, opens in the distended, languid stretch of a teenage summer. Lea, played in a stunning first turn by newcomer Lily McInerny, is 17 years old and bored. She lives with her single mother, harried and yearning Sandra (Gretchen Mol), somewhere in small-town, coastal California – palm trees and power lines, railroad tracks and modest homes – and floats through the days with sunbathing, YouTube makeup tutorials, and trips to the cheap ice cream chain store with her lustful best friend Amber (Quinn Frankel).

Lots of films mistake glamorizing and maturing adolescence for capturing it, but Dack’s feature, developed from her 2018 short of the same name, is saturated with the teenage. The actors are fresh-faced and gangly, and Dack has a keen ear for the vacuity and experimental crudeness of teenage conversations – boys ranking girls they know on a 10-point scale, girls playing along to hang, fart jokes, generally talking about nothing. Lea spends a good portion of the first 15 minutes prone – on the ground, on the floor with Amber, on the couch, on a lounge chair, in the backseat of someone’s car during passionless sex with a clueless boy – and the camera is there with her, on her level, hemmed by the smallness of her world.

Palm Trees and Power Lines is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced

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Sharp Stick review – Lena Dunham’s comeback is a misjudged experiment

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The Girls co-creator’s first feature since 2011 on a 26-year-old’s sexual awakening has flashes of brilliance but is hobbled by infantilization

Ever since Hannah Horvath, the unfocused twentysomething protagonist of the HBO series Girls, declared herself the voice of a generation, audiences have struggled to read Lena Dunham. The line was clearly at least half-ironic, a joke, but many took it at face value, indicative of Dunham’s aspirations as both a writer and public figure. Dunham has provoked, fairly and unfairly, intense reactions since Girls, which she created with Jenni Konner, put her on the map in 2012, at 25; her solid artistic instincts – go back and watch the pre-MeToo sixth season episode American Bitch, which shreds the double-edged flattery of the self-important male artist – are often accompanied by baffling foot-in-mouth moments along lines of race, class, gender, and plain old overexposure.

Sharp Stick, Dunham’s first film since her breakout feature Tiny Furniture in 2011, isn’t likely to help that reputation. This awkward, misjudged, occasionally sexy film has seeds of a radical, fresh story and flashes of directorial brilliance but is hobbled throughout by the confounding decision to write her 26-year-old main character as either insensitively neuro-divergent or more sheltered child than adult.

Sharp Stick is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced

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Liborio review – fascinating account of a true-life Dominican folk hero

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A faith healer in the Dominican Republic falls foul of the US in this arresting, ambiguous drama

Here’s a striking and mysterious debut from the Dominican Republic, where film-maker Nino Martínez Sosa recounts a fascinating true-life story of occupation and resistance from the turn of the last century. Olivorio Mateo was a peasant and faith healer who became known to his disciples as Papa Liborio; he built a self-sufficient community in the mountains. But when US forces occupied in the 1910s, Liborio was branded a bandit, and killed.

Not that you’d know any of the historical facts from watching this, which is set squarely in the arthouse endurance-test genre: there is little to no scene-setting or explainers, with the kind of pacing often euphemistically described by critics as “deliberate”. It begins after Liborio vanishes from his village during a hurricane, presumed dead. When he is found alive, he claims to have returned from God with healing powers and takes a band of followers up into the mountains.

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