The singer and actor has revealed the upcoming release of a companion album to her role in Joker: Folie à Deux
Lady Gaga has announced an accompanying 13-song album to her new film Joker: Folie à Deux.
The singer and actor had been teasing the news on social media and has now shared that the album, Harlequin, will be released on 27 September.
Continue reading...Will Paul King’s planned prequel follow in the pawprints of Paddington? Or might it stick closer to Warner Bros’ most recent origins hit: Joker?
It was announced this week that Warner Bros has greenlit what might arguably qualify as the most pointless film in cinema history: a Willy Wonka origin story.
The film called Wonka will be released in 2023, it has been in development for the last four years and there are plans to shoot in the UK in September. No casting decisions have been announced, although both Tom Holland and Timothée Chalamet have been linked to the lead role. That is currently all we know, apart from the fact that it will be terrible.
Continue reading...Mank director rails at the risk-averse production strategy of major Hollywood studios
Mank director David Fincher has described Todd Phillips’ Oscar-winning Joker as “a betrayal” of mentally ill people.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Fincher was reflecting on Joker’s surprise success at the box office in a wide-ranging attack on the risk-averse production strategy of the major Hollywood studios. Saying that studios “don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars”, he also suggested that occasionally “challenging” material can get support, if there is solid previous evidence of commercial potential.
Continue reading...Follow all the action from Hollywood as we find out who’s wearing what, who’s winning what and whose acceptance speech is dropping jaws
• Oscars tonight: predictions, timetable and all you need to know
• ‘Brad Pitt tells us he’s single’: play Oscars bingo!
Now for best animated feature. Beanie Feldstein just introduced Mindy Kaling. Is that how this is going to work without a host? A person announces a person who announces a winner? That seems like at least one step too many.
We already have a news story about Brad Pitt winning. Not that anyone was expecting it or anything.
Continue reading...Less than a week since Bafta’s strikingly white and male awards shortlist met with widespread criticism – including from the organisation’s own chief executive – the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released a set of nominations whose small concessions to diversity seem striking by contrast.
Cynthia Erivo is nominated for best actress for her role in a biopic of abolitionist Harriet Tubman, and Parasite – Bong Joon-ho’s acclaimed South Korean black comedy – is up for six awards, including best director and best picture.
Continue reading...Will The Irishman clean up? Or Marriage Story? And how will Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fare? Peter Bradshaw offers a lowdown of the main categories and his predictions and omissions
The best film category is dominated – just like everything else in the cultural conversation around movies – by Netflix, which has the majority of the nominees: Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story and Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes.
Continue reading...From Little Women and Bombshell on one side and The Irishman and The Two Popes on the other, the Academy will have to tread a careful line picking this year’s nominations
British politicians are not the only people preparing for the campaign trail; Hollywood’s awards-season schmooze offensive has also begun. Gala ball dates are being added to diaries, academy voters are being targeted and a clutch of frontrunners is emerging. Trends – most of them worrying – are also appearing.
In summary, this year it is “boy films” v “girl films”. A gaping gender divide seems to have split the field. On the girls’ side, we have two well-received titles: Bombshell, dramatising the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News, and Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. Both are stories of female defiance at the male-dominated status quo, and are cast with an embarrassment of awards-bait: Little Women features Meryl Streep, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson and Laura Dern; Bombshell has Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie and Allison Janney.
Continue reading...Why so serious? Todd Phillips’ solemn but shallow supervillain origins movie has a strong performance by Joaquin Phoenix but is weighed down by realist detail and tedious material
The year’s biggest disappointment has arrived. It emerges with weirdly grownup self-importance from the tulip fever of festival awards season as an upscale spin on an established pop culture brand. Last year we had Luca Guadagnino’s solemn version of Suspiria, and now it’s Joker, from director and co-writer Todd Phillips: a new origin myth for Batman’s most famous supervillain opponent.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, a pathetic loser and loner in Gotham City, some time in the early 1980s. Arthur is a former inpatient at a psychiatric facility but is now allowed to live with his elderly mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), in her scuzzy apartment. Poor Arthur has a neurological condition that means he is liable to break into screeching laughter at inopportune moments. He has a crush on his single-mom neighbour Sophie (Zazie Beetz) and pines to be a comedian, hero-worshipping cheesy TV host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). But he can only get a job as a clown in grinning makeup and floppy-toed shoes twirling an advertising banner outside a store, where he is bullied and beaten up by young thugs passing by. One day, after the humiliation and despair become too much to bear, Arthur gets hold of a gun and discovers that his talent is not for comedy but violence.
Continue reading...Following concerns about the potential for violence, several chains will not allow face coverings or clothing that ‘would make other guests feel uncomfortable’
Major cinema chains in the US have announced that they will enforce bans of masks, costumes and toy weapons at screenings of Joker, the new film starring Joaquin Phoenix as Batman’s nemesis, as concerns about the potential for violence connected to the film’s release on 4 October circulate.
Landmark Theatres says on its website that “no masks, painted faces or costumes will be permitted into our theatres”. AMC Theatres, the US’s largest cinema chain with more than 600 venues, has said in a statement that they are “working with law enforcement” and that their standard policy allows audience members to wear costume but “we do not permit masks, face paint or any object that conceals the face … [or] weapons or items that would make other guests feel uncomfortable”.
Continue reading...Comic book movie starring Joaquin Phoenix takes top award and An Officer and a Spy wins grand jury prize
Joker, Todd Phillips’ mordant spin on Gotham’s grinning antihero, has won the Golden Lion award at the 76th Venice film festival.
The film, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a would-be standup comic, was ecstatically received at its premiere on the Lido last weekend, with critics immediately tipping it to be the first superhero film to take the best picture Oscar.
Continue reading...