Category Archives: World cinema

‘Exhausting and extremely dangerous’: Mohammad Rasoulof on his escape from Iran

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Exclusive: The director of The Seed of the Sacred Fig details how he discarded electronic devices and fled over the mountains on foot after authorities sentenced him to eight years in prison and flogging

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof escaped imminent imprisonment in Iran by discarding all trackable electronic devices and walking across a mountainous borderland on foot, the film-maker has told the Guardian in an exclusive interview.

But even though he has found shelter in Germany and is optimistic about attending next week’s Cannes premiere of the film that nearly saw him jailed for eight years, Rasoulof said he still expects to return to his home country “quite soon” and sit out his sentence.

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‘Irreplaceable’: will Hayao Miyazaki, Japan’s animation auteur, ever retire?

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The Boy and the Heron’s Oscar win has prompted debate over whether the 83-year-old could put down his pencil

It could have been the perfect send-off – recognition at the Academy Awards of the artistry of Japan’s peerless animator Hayao Miyazaki.

The moment The Boy and the Heron was named the winner of best animated feature in Los Angeles last weekend gave Japan a chance to reflect on Miyazaki’s towering influence, and contemplate whether the 83-year-old is truly finished making films.

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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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Helmut Berger, star of Visconti’s The Damned, dies aged 78

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Acclaimed actor in European art cinema also secured a prominent role in US soap opera Dynasty

Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who became a star of 60s and 70s art cinema with roles in films such as Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, and Ludwig and Joseph Losey’s The Romantic Englishwoman, has died aged 78. His death was announced by his management agency, which posted a statement on its website saying Berger had “passed away peacefully but unexpectedly” in Salzburg, the city where he grew up.

Born Helmut Steinberger in the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl in 1944, Berger studied acting in London before moving to Italy, where he met and began a relationship with acclaimed director Luchino Visconti, nearly 40 years his senior. Visconti gave him his first acting role, a small part in the comic anthology The Witches, and subsequently cast him in a spectacular role in his landmark 1969 epic The Damned. Berger played Martin von Essenbeck, a scion of a wealthy industrial family who struggle for control over the business in interwar Germany as the Nazis rise to power; for the film, Berger famously performed in drag as Marlene Dietrich and was subsequently nominated for a Golden Globe for most promising male newcomer.

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Spanish film-maker Carlos Saura, director of ¡Ay Carmela!, dies aged 91

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One of Spain’s most prolific auteurs continued to work until the end – his last film, Walls Can Talk, was released last week

Veteran Spanish film-maker Carlos Saura, director of award-winning films such as Peppermint Frappé, ¡Ay Carmela! and Tango, has died aged 91, the day before he was due to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Goyas, Spain’s version of the Oscars.

Spain’s Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, the body that hands out the Goya awards, confirmed his death on social media, saying: “Saura, one of the essential film-makers in the history of Spanish cinema, has died at home today at the age of 91, surrounded by his loved ones. His final film, Walls Can Talk, came out last week and demonstrated his tireless activity and his love for his work until the very last moment.”

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The Spirit of the Beehive director Víctor Erice to make his first feature in 30 years

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Spanish auteur behind the 1973 arthouse hit will direct a new film, Cerrar los Ojos, due for release in 2023

Veteran Spanish director Víctor Erice, best known for 1973 classic The Spirit of the Beehive, is making his first feature film in 30 years, it has been revealed.

El Diario reports that the new project, titled Cerrar los Ojos (Close Your Eyes), is being funded by Canal Sur, the public broadcaster for the Andalusia region of Spain. No information has been divulged as to its content, other than that José Coronado and María León have been cast in the lead roles, and that it is due for release in 2023.

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Actor Noémie Merlant: ‘Women have been taught to see ourselves through other people’s desire’

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The Portrait of a Lady on Fire star talks about her role in Jacques Audiard’s new dating drama, making a documentary about her own family, and the Hollywood actor who inspires her

The French actor Noémie Merlant is in demand these days – especially since 2019, when Céline Sciamma’s acclaimed Portrait of a Lady on Fire massively boosted her international profile. When I talk to her on Zoom, she’s rushing between two films, on her mobile in a car travelling from one shoot in Brest in northern France to another in the Pyrenees.

Despite her busy schedule, and the distraction of having just lost her bank card, Merlant is focused enough to talk with enthusiastic intensity (and no, she’s not driving the car) about Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District, which is released in the UK next month. The film is something of a departure for the 69-year-old director, who is often associated with crime dramas (A Prophet, The Beat That My Heart Skipped). It’s about young people in a multiracial Paris, and the 21st-century digital economy of passion: dating apps, instant hookups and webcam sex. And given that he’s often considered a very male film-maker, this feature notably adopts a very female perspective; it’s co-written, in fact, with Sciamma, and the writer-director Léa Mysius.

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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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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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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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China’s go-to English bad guy Kevin Lee: ‘I’m happy to play a villain’

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The English actor, who has worked with Chinese directors from Jackie Chan to Zhang Yimou, reveals how a chance meeting at the visa office in Beijing changed his life

If the Chinese film industry needs a stock foreign villain, I’m their first port of call. I was a Gatling gun-wielding mercenary in 2015’s Wolf Warrior, one of the first of the new wave of military blockbusters, and a hitman in Jackie Chan’s Kung Fu Yoga in 2017, among many others. And I recently played an American colonel in the Korean war in The Battle at Lake Changjin, the most expensive and successful Chinese film ever: it made $909m (£675m) last year.

It’s surreal – coming from humble beginnings in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire – to find myself in the middle of a massive field in Hubei province filming the likes of The Battle at Lake Changjin. You’d think you were in a real-life warzone – there were hundreds of tanks supplied by the government. I grew up watching Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee and Jet Li movies, which kickstarted my passion for China. I originally came here to study martial arts in 2004. Then I came back 10 years later to work as a financial consultant, which I didn’t really enjoy.

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Screen sensation: the single-shot thriller bringing time-travel into the Zoom era

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It was shot in a week and premiered to 12 people, but micro-budget sci-fi movie Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes has become the breakout success of the year

“We made the film in seven days, shooting non-stop from six in the evening to six in the morning. It was hell. We were always tired. And the cast and crew were always picking on me because my brain would just go completely dead at 2am every day.” Japanese film-maker Junta Yamaguchi is talking about his first feature film, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, which was shot almost entirely inside a real cafe in Kyoto. “We couldn’t film anything during their opening hours.”

But Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes isn’t your average small-scale indie film. It’s a nicely innovative time-travel yarn that asks: in our world of remote working and Zoom calls, what if the face staring back at us from our computer was a version of ourself two minutes in the future? It’s also the latest example of the nagamawashi (long-shot) film, the micro-genre currently putting no-budget Japanese cinema on the map after the success of One Cut of the Dead – the 2017 zombie horror-comedy that became an international cult sensation, grossing over $30m (£22m) worldwide from a $25,000 budget.

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The Hand of God review – Paolo Sorrentino tells his own Maradona story

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The Italian film-maker may owe his life to the footballer, as this vivid, autobiographical Neapolitan drama reveals

Paolo Sorrentino’s extravagantly personal movie gives us all a sentimental education in this director’s boyhood and coming of age – or at any rate, what he now creatively remembers of it – in Naples in the 1980s, where everyone had gone collectively crazy for SSC Napoli’s new signing, footballing legend Diego Maradona. We watch as a family party explodes with joy around the TV when Maradona scores his handball goal in the 1986 World Cup. A leftwing uncle growls with pleasure at the imperialist English getting scammed.

This is a tribute to Sorrentino’s late parents, who in 1987 died together of carbon monoxide poisoning at their holiday chalet outside the city, where 16-year-old Paolo might himself also have been staying had it not been that he wanted to see Napoli playing at home. So maybe Maradona saved his life, but it was a bittersweet rescue. The hand of God, after all, struck down his mum and dad and spared him. Newcomer Filippo Scotti plays 16-year-old Fabietto (that is, Sorrentino himself) at the centre of a garrulous swirl of family members. Toni Servillo plays his dad, Saverio, and Teresa Saponangelo gives a lovely performance as his mother, Maria, with a skittish love of making practical jokes.

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Volcano review – spoon-glueing Ukrainian adventure takes a surreal turn

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Roman Bondarchuk handles this strange tale about an interpreter left stranded with some locals with deadpan poise

“That’s our wandering buoy. It slipped its anchor near the dam. It appears and disappears at will.” A light, unfathomable absurdity governs this 2018 fiction debut by Ukrainian documentarian Roman Bondarchuk, set in the area around the city of Kherson; a sun-roasted steppe north of the Crimea where Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) interpreter Lukas (Serhiy Stepansky) becomes stranded. He’s escorting an SUV full of foreign delegates when it breaks down and he wanders off in search of a mobile signal. On his return, both car and foreigners have vanished.

Hitching a ride, Lukas is invited to stay with Vova (Viktor Zhdanov), a middle-aged potterer living with his mother and daughter in a capacious ramshackle construction on the banks of the Dnieper river. So begins Lukas’s initiation – like a milder Ukrainian version of Wake in Fright – into the local anomie. Vova enjoys sticking spoons to his forehead using the supply of glue that was his severance payment from the Soviet fish farm he worked for; then Lukas gets an invite to a listless student party where someone nicks his jacket and wallet. Constantly slipping sly details into the frame, Bondarchuk handles the whole farrago with a lovely deadpan poise. Incensed by the theft, Lukas heads to the police station to make a complaint. Cut to him in the cells.

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7 Prisoners review – a powerful tale of slavery in modern-day São Paulo

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An impoverished teen seeks to escape the clutches of a human trafficker in Alexandre Moratto’s complex drama

Brazilian director Alexandre Moratto’s follow-up to his award-winning debut Socrates, 7 Prisoners delves into the subject of modern slavery through the eyes of 18-year-old Mateus (Christian Malheiros, excellent). In order to support his family, Mateus takes a job in the city, but finds himself imprisoned and working off a seemingly endless debt to his employer (Rodrigo Santoro). His initial reaction is desperation and anger, but Mateus is smart and negotiates with his captor on behalf of his fellow workers. The rather on-the-nose storytelling grows increasingly complex and interesting the further that the protagonist ventures into morally ambiguous territory.

In cinemas and on Netflix from 11 November

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Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung: ‘I’m very strange-looking, in a good way’

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As the London Korean film festival kicks off, Youn Yuh-jung, talks about how her portrayals of racy grannies and scheming maids scandalised the nation

In her Oscar-winning turn in last year’s Minari, Youn Yuh-jung played the mischievous granny you wished you’d had: the one who ignores your fun-sucking parents, takes you on wild adventures and teaches you to do your own thing. “You’re not a real grandma,” her Americanised grandson tells her. “They bake cookies! They don’t swear! They don’t wear men’s underwear!” In real life, Youn is pretty similar: lively, funny, unpretentious, and, she admits, not all that good at cooking. The 74-year-old actor has had an unconventional life and career, and most of us in the west know only a tiny fraction of it.

“My problem is, I don’t plan anything!” Youn laughs over Zoom from Los Angeles. Unlike her character in Minari, she speaks fluent English, although she apologises for it not being good enough.

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The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmāo review – sisters fight the pain of patriarchy

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This gorgeous and moving melodrama finds two women in 1950s Rio under suffocating family expectations – and sees what happens when they are defied

‘What do you want from life?” a husband drunkenly yells at his wife in Karim Aïnouz’s gorgeous and very moving melodrama set in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. The man’s wife is Euridice (Julia Stockler) and what she wants is to be a classical pianist. Her husband is angry and hurt: why can’t she just be happy in the kitchen? Adapted from a novel by Martha Batalha, this is the story of Euridice and her sister Guida (Carol Duarte): their inner conflicts and rebellion against the suffocating patriarchy of home.

The film beings a few years earlier: Euridice is 18 and applying to study music in Vienna. Her heart is broken when boy-mad Guida runs away with a no-good sailor to Greece, promising to write when she is married. Predictably, she returns with a baby bump and no wedding ring. There’s an appalling homecoming scene when their dad, a baker, violently shoves Guida out of the house; she’s nine months pregnant at the time (and the film never lets us forget that violence can be done to these women at any time of a man’s choosing). Unforgivably, Guida’s dad says that Euridice has left Rio and is living in Vienna. The truth is she’s up the road, married to an insightless oaf.

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Brusque cops and femmes fatales: discovering Gilles Grangier’s forgotten noir gem

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Le Désordre et la Nuit, shown as part of a retrospective for the great thriller director at Lyon’s Lumière film festival, is a well-crafted treat for fans of the genre

A big feature, and an even bigger pleasure, of this year’s Lumière film festival in Lyon is the retrospective for the French master of policiers and crime, Gilles Grangier, a director who enjoyed great commercial success in movies and later in TV from the 1950s to the 80s, working with actors such as Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura and the great screenwriter Michel Audiard (father of Jacques). He was a working-class film-maker who came up from the streets of Paris, and started in the movies as a stuntman, grip, prop boy, any job he could get.

Grangier is a name perhaps eclipsed now by Jean-Pierre Melville and made to feel obsolete in the 60s by the New Wave as he was making the kind of well-crafted, unpretentious genre pictures that the new generation of revolutionaries affected to despise (while admiring the Hollywood equivalent). But his movies here have been a revelation – the late Bertrand Tavernier, the founder of this festival, was always a great ally of Grangier’s – particularly his amazingly dry, witty, briskly unsentimental lowlife crime melodrama Le Désordre et la Nuit from 1958. This thriller was adapted by Grangier and Audiard from a novel by the French wartime journalist Jacques Robert, celebrated for his 1945 reports from Berlin and being one of the few writers who saw the inside of Hitler’s bunker.

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The Maid review – a giddy, gory satire that sticks it to the super-wealthy

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Shadowy figures lurk in Lee Thongkham’s stylised horror, which wrongfoots the audience with jump scares aplenty

Thai writer-director Lee Thongkham’s horror feature is a giddy, gory little treat. Unfortunately, it’s hard to explain exactly what’s so fab about it without spoilers, so just take our word for it as long as you have the stomach for lots of fake blood and jump scares. Suffice to say that Thongkham is nimble when it comes to wrongfooting the viewer, and there’s some pleasingly pointed satire here as well, sticking it to rich, snobby people who think domestic workers are as disposable as empty washing up bottles.

The maid of the title is Joy (bob-haired ingenue Ploy Sornarin), a country girl who gets hired to schlep tea trays up and down the stairs in service to super-wealthy Uma (actor-model-singer Savika Chaiyadej), a woman so ridiculously haughty she dresses like a gameshow hostess for breakfast and always uses a cigarette holder – presumably so the butts don’t touch her lips. Joy has worked out that she’s but the latest in a long line of maids who don’t last long in that household, but when she asks the other servants they get all squirrelly and tell her she’s not to ask any questions.

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Shorta review – Danish urban thriller gets the heart pumping

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Two cops are stranded in hostile territory when an act of police brutality triggers a riot in this slick action film

Denmark’s reputation as the land of tolerance, equality and cosy contentment takes a battering in this superslick urban thriller directed with adrenaline and savvy by first timers Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders Ølholm. “Shorta” is Arabic for “police”, and the movie opens with black teenager Talib Ben Hassi lying face down, a white police officer on his back. “I can’t breathe,” he pleads. We don’t see Talib again but his name is repeated over and over: on the streets in Svalegårdena, the fictional estate where he grew up; by TV journalists reporting on his condition in intensive care; at the police station where damage limitation is in overdrive.

Officers are warned to stay out of Svalegårdena – a powder keg waiting to explode. The shift commander puts solidly decent Jens (Simon Sears) in a car with repellent racist Mike (Jacob Hauberg Lohmann), a man who demands respect by bullying and intimidation. The script sets up these familiar cop stereotypes then messes with them – not massively convincingly to be honest. Jens in particular I found difficult to get a handle on; this is a film where characters act in ways to make the plot tick more than anything else. Things go wrong when Mike stops and searches cheeky Arab kid Amos (Tarek Zayat). He goes in hard, humiliates Amos, arrests him; at that moment news breaks that Talib is dead, triggering a riot.

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