The prolific actor appeared in more than 190 films and TV shows and was a vocal anti-war activist
Donald Sutherland, whose acting career spanned six decades and included starring in such highly acclaimed films as Don’t Look Now, M*A*S*H and The Hunger Games, has died aged 88.
He died in Miami after a long illness, confirmed by his representatives.
Continue reading...Fans in costumes gathered at the London station to watch a train for ‘Hogsmeade’ on platform 9¾ appear on the departure board
Thousands of Harry Potter fans braved the rail strikes on Friday to gather at King’s Cross station in London for “back to Hogwarts day”.
Many wearing wizard robes and carrying wands, fans of the franchise travelled to the station to hear the magical loudspeaker call for the Hogwarts Express at 11am, inviting witches and wizards to board the train to Hogsmeade on platform 9¾.
Continue reading...Mattel says the Barney movie will be inspired by Charlie Kaufman, while Barbie director Greta Gerwig is planning two Narnia movies for Netflix
The Daniel Kaluuya-produced movie featuring Barney the Dinosaur will be an “adult”, “surrealistic” and “A24-type” film inspired by Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, it has been revealed.
In a wide-ranging report on the film-making plans of toymaker Mattel in the New Yorker, Mattel Films executive Kevin McKeon said of the project: “We’re leaning into the millennial angst of the property rather than fine-tuning this for kids. It’s really a play for adults. Not that it’s R-rated, but it’ll focus on some of the trials and tribulations of being thirtysomething, growing up with Barney – just the level of disenchantment within the generation.”
Continue reading...The final episode of the first season of the hit Game of Thrones prequel has landed online days early
The season finale of House of the Dragon has leaked online just two days before it was set to premiere on HBO.
According to an HBO spokesperson, the much-anticipated episode of the hit Game of Thrones prequel appears to have come from a distribution partner in Europe, the Middle East or Africa.
Continue reading...Big-budget fantasy sequel has had six seconds cut, as Warner Bros releases statement to say ‘the spirit of the film remains intact’
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore has been edited for release in China to ensure any gay references have been removed.
The fantasy sequel, which has an estimated budget of $200m, contains allusions to a romantic history between the characters of Dumbledore and Grindelwald, played by Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen respectively. Six seconds of dialogue, including the lines “Because I was in love with you” and “The summer Gellert and I fell in love”, were taken out for the Chinese release on 8 April.
Continue reading...Original manuscripts show how author rewrote scenes for 1950s adaptation of his Middle-earth epic Lord of the Rings
Decades before Peter Jackson directed his epic adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien was involved with the first ever dramatisation of his trilogy, but its significance was not realised in the 1950s and the BBC’s audio recordings are believed to have been destroyed.
Now an Oxford academic has delved into the BBC archives and discovered the original scripts for the two series of 12 radio episodes broadcast in 1955 and 1956, to the excitement of fellow scholars.
Continue reading...It is hailed as one of the greatest action movies ever, but making Mad Max: Fury Road was far from easy. Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, director George Miller and a huge cast of creatives recall what went down in the Namib desert
Plenty of movies claim to be mad and filled with fury, taking it to the max. Very few make good on that promise. Like everyone else at the time, my gob got smacked and stayed smacked by George Miller’s deranged post-apocalyptic convoy-chase action spectacular Mad Max: Fury Road. It was so over the top that the top was a distant memory, far beneath my feet.
This was a 2015 revival of Miller’s 70s/80s punk-western franchise Mad Max, taking it to a new level of strangeness and delirium. Tom Hardy plays Max Rockatansky, survivor of a global catastrophe that has made oil and water rare commodities: he does battle with a hateful warlord called Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and makes common cause with a one-armed warrior bearing the gloriously Latinate name of Imperator Furiosa – an amazing performance from Charlize Theron. Monstrous 18-wheeler rigs scream across the scrub, with guitarists aboard playing thrash metal.
Continue reading...The films he produced or greenlit won more than 50 Oscars and 150 nominations
Alan Ladd Jr, the Oscar-winning producer and studio boss who as a 20th Century Fox executive greenlit Star Wars, has died. He was 84.
Ladd died Wednesday, his daughter Amanda Ladd-Jones, who directed the documentary Laddie: The Man Behind the Movies, wrote in a Facebook post. No cause of death was given.
Continue reading...Bringing Spideys old and new together was a masterclass in giving audiences what they want, and points to what Batman v Superman got so wrong
Fan service has come a long way since 2006, when studio New Line allowed its audience to basically crowd-think the entirety of Samuel L Jackson action epic Snakes on a Plane. Back then, somebody high up thought it would be a really good idea to start borrowing lines for Jackson to say (while fighting off those airborne reptiles) from a hyped-up geek community who had been spending most of their spare time discussing the unreleased movie on fan forums and blogs. The best/worst of them ended up being the legendary (for all the wrong reasons) line: “Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” Up there with Jackson’s famous Ezekiel 25:17 speech about the path of the righteous man it really wasn’t.
This week Marvel and Sony have shown how to do fan service properly. And all it took was a staged meme featuring all three webslingers from global megasmash Spider-Man: No Way Home pointing at each other. The image recalls a famous still from episode 19 of the 1967-1970 animated Spider-Man show, in which a Spidey-impostor – clue, he’s really a criminal – tries to impersonate the masked wallcrawler. It’s since been used millions of times in social media posts, often to illustrate moments when celebrities meet each other (according to the Know Your Meme website).
Continue reading...The actor, who broke through in 1983 playing a welder who dreamed of being a dancer, reflects on a life of activism, why gen Z give her hope and joining the Star Wars universe
Jennifer Beals is talking to me by Zoom from … “Do I have to say?” she asks. Not really, I tell her. “I can tell you there’s a blizzard outside and it’s really beautiful.” Her reticence, which lasts about 30 seconds, is because she is in New York, filming a yet to be announced new season of Law & Order. You could imagine her taking a friend’s secret to the grave; she is very cagey about where she lives, tending to call herself “nomadic” and describing her home as “the middle of nowhere” (in reality, somewhere near Los Angeles). Commercial discretion, though? Not so much.
It is creepy to go on about how young actors still look, as though that were a goal in itself, but Beals, 58, is so unchanged – since she first played Bette in The L Word in 2004; since Devil in a Blue Dress in 1995 – that my brain thinks it is making a mistake. She definitely, positively starred in Flashdance in 1983, her breakthrough role after a tiny part in My Bodyguard three years earlier, yet that can’t be right – it was 40 years ago! It is like walking past someone you think you knew at school, then realising that it can’t be them because this person is 21.
Continue reading...A mother and her daughters hole up in a Victorian conservatory, hiding from a devastating pandemic that lays waste to human memory
Shot in a Victorian hothouse in South Africa with a mixed cast of local actors and the odd imported Brit – including Jessica Alexander, soon be seen in Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid – this tense dystopian horror-thriller feels geographically non-specific, almost as if it were taking place in some kind of dream world. That touch of hazy vagueness is just right for SA director and co-writer Kelsey Egan’s cracking feature debut (co-written with Emma Lungiswa De Wet) which imagines a family of survivors hiding out in the title’s botanical conservatory after a pandemic has ravaged most of the world’s population.
The invisible threat here is an airborne virus called “the shred” which wipes out memories and leaves its victims in a bestial state, unable to remember even their own names. A matriarchal woman known only as Mother (Adrienne Pearce) guides her three female progeny – cautious Evie (Anja Taljaard), dreamy Bee (Alexander) and adolescent Daisy (Kitty Harris), alongside shred-infected brother Gabe (Brent Vermeulen) – by teaching them how to garden (they have to pollinate the plants themselves because the bees are all gone), to read, paint, and pass on the stories of the Before Times.
Continue reading...From murderous mayhem in The Purge to the grim dystopia of Soylent Green, writers have predicted very bad things for the next 12 months
It’s gotten rather tricky to calibrate the the annual relative quotient of tragedy. (For the future reference of misery-focused sociologists, that’s the ARQT.) 2021 was a year of tribulation closing out with a backslide into the same rampant viral spread that we saw in square one of the pandemic that just won’t end – but hey, at least it’s not 2020 any more. As it becomes apparent that we will have to accept a few massive catastrophes as the new status quo, assessing the quality of life turns into a matter of degrees, weighing each fresh stretch of hardship against the last. It may prove some cold comfort to note that things have, by sheer numbers, gotten slightly better since last year. The corollary to this way of thinking, however, is the understanding that our circumstances can always get worse.
Just take a look at the films set in the year 2022, united as they are in agreement that something horrible is just waiting to happen. There’s a futuristic sheen to the number, as if a robot’s stuttering while giving a readout of two, that’s compelled a handful of film-makers to select this date as the point at which a major crisis comes to pass. Whether it’s a chance armageddon landing at an inopportune time or a boiling-over that our species has been building to for years, the movies have marked 2022 as cursed. The only hope as we approach the beginning of another year is that whatever challenges await us, they won’t have the terrible finality of the world-enders listed below. Read on for a smorgasbord of possible apocalypses imagined for the coming months, and take some solace in the small consolation that we have yet to start eating each other:
Continue reading...A sunny new world beckons for Neo and Trinity in this self-aware but smart fourth instalment of the sci-fi classic
Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is the designer of The Matrix, a popular video game set in a virtual reality. His bosses have ordered a sequel; at an ideas meeting, his colleagues throw around a few ideas. PVC. Guns. Trans allegory. There is much winking and nudging in Lana Wachowski’s follow-up to the groundbreaking sci-fi films she co-created with her sister Lilly. Wachowski understands that in the 20 years since, their legacy has been boiled down to a catalogue of memes with lucrative franchise potential. Yet her newest chapter manages to be self-aware (at times overly so) without being entirely cynical.
Those foggy on the details of the trilogy’s plot will benefit from the exposition-heavy first act. Plagued by memories of his past, Anderson – also known as Neo – must once again choose whether to take the red pill offered by hacker Bugs (Jessica Henwick, whip-smart), and wake up, or continue to swallow his current reality. Carrie-Anne Moss’s Tiffany, a motorcycle mechanic and mother of two whom Neo remembers as Trinity, has a choice to make too. The romance between them has always been the molten core of the Matrix films; their power as a duo is what drives the story forward.
Continue reading...Neil Patrick Harris and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II join Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in a fourth instalment in the franchise that is full of little treasures
There’s no need for a blue pill. The Matrix Resurrections is, by and large, an engaging and energetic motion picture, and worthy of being on the same shelf as the groundbreaking original from 1999. Unlike the soul-crushingly dull previous entry, The Matrix Revolutions, it remembers that mind-scrambling pseudo-intellectual yammering gets tiresome on-screen if there isn’t also some fun. Luckily, director Lana Wachowski, working apart from her sister Lilly for the first time, and her screenwriting partners David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, have included plenty of flashbacks. A rewatch isn’t absolutely necessary. But talking about the new one after you see it is.
Continue reading...Keanu Reeves is back as cyberpunk icon Neo but fans of the original will find this cynical reboot a bitter pill to swallow
Eighteen years after what we thought was the third and final Matrix film, The Matrix Revolutions, Lana Wachowski has directed a fourth: The Matrix Resurrections. But despite some ingenious touches (a very funny name, for example, for a VR coffee shop) the boulder has been rolled back from the tomb to reveal that the franchise’s corpse is sadly still in there. This is a heavy-footed reboot which doesn’t offer a compelling reason for its existence other than to gouge a fourth income stream from Matrix fans, submissively hooked up for new content, and it doesn’t have anything approaching the breathtaking “bullet time” action sequences that made the original film famous.
The first Matrix was a brilliant, prescient sci-fi action thriller that in 1999 presented us with Keanu Reeves as a computer hacker codenamed “Neo”, stumbling across the apparent activity of a police state whose workings he scarcely suspected. Charismatic rebel Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) brings Neo to the mysterious figure of Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) who offers our reluctant hero one of the most famous choices in modern cinema: the blue pill or the red pill. The first will allow Neo back into his torpid quasi-contentment, the second will irreversibly reveal to him the truth about all existence. He swallows the red and discovers all our lives exist in a digitally fabricated, illusory world, while our comatose bodies are milked for their energies in giant farms by our machine overlords.
Continue reading...Meagre turnout for West Side Story shows that these days, the way to cash in on intellectual property is via sequels and reboots
So far, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story hasn’t had audiences pirouetting and finger-clicking their way to cinemas. There are plenty of reasons why; the main one relating to a certain global pandemic. But one explanation that keeps being proffered is that viewers are simply sick of remakes – and it’s not entirely wrong. Hollywood still has no qualms about bringing back its vintage franchises, of course. But as the imminent returns of The Matrix, Scream, Top Gun, Indiana Jones, Hocus Pocus and Legally Blonde demonstrate, the fashionable way to cash in on a venerable intellectual property is to hire as many of the original cast members as you can and to pick up where you left off. Sequels are in; remakes are out.
Remakes, lest we forget, were once central to the cinematic landscape – hardly more remarkable or disreputable than a new theatrical production of an old play. When The Maltese Falcon came out in 1940, it was the third adaptation of the same book within a decade. Some Like It Hot? Pinched from a 1951 German farce, which was in turn pinched from a 1935 French one. Hitchcock’s 1956 classic The Man Who Knew Too Much? A total rip-off of Hitchcock’s 1934 classic, The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...The veteran American actor, star of Blue Velvet and Quantum Leap, has died aged 85. We look back at his 76-year career, from early roles alongside Errol Flynn and Katharine Hepburn to later award-winning TV work
Continue reading...Richard Kelly’s unusual sci-fi drama made a star of Jake Gyllenhaal and introduced emo teens to a brave new world
Midway through Donnie Darko, a creative young English teacher played by Drew Barrymore repeats the old maxim – recycled over the years by linguists, scholars and writers including JRR Tolkien – that the simple, banal phrase “cellar door” is the most purely, pleasingly harmonious combination of words in the English language. There’s something to be said for that, but one wonders if writer-director Richard Kelly was offering a challenge to the claim by naming his protagonist Donnie Darko – an irresistible, perfectly ridiculous name for an ordinary suburban schoolboy that nonetheless encapsulates his fey, eccentric aura. His new girlfriend says the name aloud, lolling it like a mint in her mouth, before observing that it makes him sound like “some kind of superhero”. “What makes you think I’m not?” he replies, deadpan.
Well, what indeed. Kelly’s sci-fi-tinted tale of adolescent isolation came out six months before Spider-Man, the film that kick-started the now all-consuming superhero movie revival, and the two have more in common than you might initially assume: both are stories of an awkward teenage boy coming to terms with what appear to be otherworldly abilities, and assuming responsibility for the world around them. For plucky Peter Parker, that means standard-issue feats of derring-do and defeating evil; for downcast Donnie Darko, it means ending and altering the very timeline in which he exists, ultimately dying so that others may live. As superhero origin stories go, it doesn’t have much franchise potential: Donnie’s legend begins and ends in one fell swoop. But it has an eerie, enduring power: would that many comic-book heroes’ stories were so noble and haunting and finite.
Continue reading...As we reach the 20th anniversary of the magical British blockbusters, the real magic lies in the way its young stars have stayed on the rails – unlike many before them
There are many magical things about the Harry Potter film series, which marks its 20th anniversary this month with a re-release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Perhaps the most miraculous one, though, is that its three stars – Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint – are still alive, apparently content, and not noticeably addicted to class A drugs.
Each continued acting, occasionally even starring in bona fide hits: Radcliffe in The Woman in Black; Watson, who is also a UN women goodwill ambassador, in Beauty and the Beast. Grint, star of the M Night Shyamalan series Servant, also became a father last year – his partner is another former child actor, Georgia Groome of Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging – and celebrated by joining Instagram. Even there, he has shown a characteristic level-headedness by posting a mere six times in 11 months.
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