Vue cinemas add an interval to Scorsese’s bladderbusting 206-minute Killers of the Flower Moon
We have all felt it: that numbness in the back and legs, a full bladder, or desperately avoiding checking your watch to see how long is left of the film.
But the experience seems to be happening more and more for cinemagoers, who say the growing trend for long movies is putting them off going altogether.
Continue reading...Taylor Swift’s concert movie, now the biggest of all time, continues to dominate US box office despite release of Martin Scorsese’s anticipated crime drama
In a movie match-up almost as unlikely as Barbie and Oppenheimer, Martin Scorsese took on Taylor Swift in cinemas over the weekend. And while the US box office belonged for a second time to Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon got off to a strong start in Apple Studios’ first major theatrical gambit.
After a record-breaking opening weekend in North America of $92.8m, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour took in an estimated $31m over the weekend from 3,855 locations, according to AMC Theaters. In an unconventional deal, the theater chain is distributing Swift’s concert film, and playing it only Thursdays through Sundays.
Continue reading...Director in London for Killers of the Flower Moon premiere says it is time to ‘rethink what you want to say and how you want to say it’
Martin Scorsese has urged young film-makers to use new technology for “serious” work, as he emphasised the importance of cinema over content.
Speaking at a Screen Talk at the BFI London film festival hosted by the British film-maker Edgar Wright, Scorsese – arguably America’s highest status film director – said the industry’s “period of reinventing” didn’t have to spell the end of auteur-led film-making.
Continue reading...Oscar winner urges signing of petition after Iran court finds Saeed Roustaee guilty of ‘contributing to propaganda’ for showing banned movie
Martin Scorsese has backed a petition against the jailing of the prominent Iranian movie director Saeed Roustaee for screening a film at the Cannes film festival.
Scorsese, the Oscar-winning director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, reposted a campaign launched by his daughter Francesca this week after news of Roustaee’s prison sentence emerged.
Continue reading...Shang-Chi actor says Tarantino and fellow Marvel critic Martin Scorsese ‘don’t get to point their nose at me or anyone’ in response to director’s comments
Director Quentin Tarantino has criticised Marvel films, saying the studio does not produce movie stars and Marvel films “are the only things that seem to be made”, leading to backlash from Marvel star Simu Liu.
Speaking on the 2 Bears, 1 Cave podcast, Tarantino said the decline in movie stars was attributable to the “Marvelisation of Hollywood”.
Continue reading...After years of avoiding crime films, he’s back as a mafioso in the Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark. He talks about being adopted and getting into acting – and saves a surprise for the end
I am a little trepidatious ahead of my interview with Ray Liotta because the reviews, shall we say, are mixed. Not about his acting, which has been accoladed and adored from his first major film role, as Melanie Griffith’s crazy ex in 1986’s Something Wild, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. No, the problematic reviews are about Liotta personally. One person who worked with him described him to me as “the rudest arsehole I ever met”; another said he’s “a bit of a wildcard”, and I suspect that the latter is a euphemism for the former.
This would explain a long-running movie mystery: why isn’t he more successful?’ It took Liotta, now 66, until he was 30 to bag Something Wild, but after that, movie stardom seemed assured. He went from there to starring opposite Tom Hulce in the little-remembered Dominick and Eugene, and then playing “Shoeless” Joe Jackson in the extremely well-remembered Field of Dreams.
Continue reading...Ahead of the Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark hitting cinemas, here are 30 organised crime flicks you must see before you sleep with the fishes
Our criteria here is films featuring actual mobsters and the organised crime milieu – as opposed to hitmen, heists or bank robbers. Stefano Sollima’s punchy neo-noir, set in 2011, fits the bill with its imbroglio of crime families, political corruption and Rome real estate. Financed by Netflix, this is essentially a feature-length pilot for the addictive Suburra: Blood on Rome prequel series.
Continue reading...At a Tribeca film festival event, the director and his star Robert De Niro discussed the legacy of the greatest boxing movie ever made
In Martin Scorsese’s 1980 magnum opus, Raging Bull, the self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta goes from the greatest to a washed-up parody of himself, clinging to his memories of the good ol’ days. For the director and star Robert De Niro, looking back on the film from the present day could have been tempting fate, a couple of ageing men reminiscing about their younger years via a movie illustrating the hazards of just that.
At this year’s closing night for De Niro’s own Tribeca film festival, during an hour-long pre-recorded conversation that preceded the evening’s screening, there was a slight hint of the rueful in the way he and dear pal “Marty” discussed the experience with emcee Leonardo DiCaprio. “Our way of making movies went down,” Scorsese proclaimed, citing the massive financial failure of the pricy Heaven’s Gate that same year as a sign that the party was over for creative talents in search of studio carte blanche. “The kind of thing we were doing was too much trouble for, ah, what they would reap from it.” De Niro clarified: “Money.”
Continue reading...Soon to be seen in The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, the actor has a CV taking in dancing losers, choric narrators, a Bible-misquoting killer – and Marvel’s coolest middleman
Samuel L Jackson is the elegantly besuited, cane-twirling, fourth-wall-breaking narrator in Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (pronounced “shy-rack”), set in the city of Chicago, where the homicide rate has exceeded the US death toll in Iraq. It is a twist on Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, about one woman’s mission to end the Peloponnesian war with a sex strike. Teyonah Parris plays Lysistrata, the girlfriend of a gangbanger. She reaches out to the wives and partners of their enemies with a similar idea – and the chant: “No peace, no pussy!” Jackson is the dapper, impish Dolmedes, whose rhyming couplets bring us into the story.
Continue reading...The award-winning biopic of Jake LaMotta was released 40 years ago. With these exclusive images, Jay Glennie, who interviewed the cast and crew for a new book, reveals secrets of the film’s shoot
As she prepares to smash an Oscar record, the great actor talks about drawing on her own suffering, missing her violent mother – and surviving the Hollywood ‘hamburger machine’
Ellen Burstyn is struggling to make herself heard above the sirens that are screeching across the city. “I live on a road that’s very popular with police cars and ambulances,” she says down the line from New York. She had been trying to tell me about the Oscars when she was interrupted by the racket. If she is nominated in March – and, with the odds of her winning best supporting actress currently at 5/1, she almost certainly will be – this would make her the Academy’s oldest acting nominee, having turned 88 this month. “At the moment, it’s Chris Plummer,” she says excitedly. “But I would beat him by 42 days! What a great crown that would be to wear.”
If her performance in the Netflix drama Pieces of a Woman wins her a nomination, it will be her seventh. Over the last 50 years, Burstyn has been recognised for her portrayals of a jaded wife in The Last Picture Show; of a mother whose child is demonically possessed in The Exorcist; and of a widowed waitress who hits the road with her young son in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. In Same Time, Next Year, she played a married woman who meets annually with her lover; in Resurrection she was a car crash survivor who acquires healing powers; and in Requiem for a Dream she starred as the mother of a junkie who becomes an addict herself.
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...Former stockbroker sues scandal-hit production company Red Granite for fraud and breach of contract
Jordan Belfort, the former stockbroker whose story inspired the Martin Scorsese-directed hit The Wolf of Wall Street, is suing the film’s financiers for fraud and breach of contract, and claiming $300m in compensation.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Belfort’s legal action arises directly from the financial scandal surrounding Red Granite, the production company that put up the film’s $100m budget but was subsequently linked to a multimillion-dollar embezzlement in which huge sums were siphoned from 1MDB, a Malaysian state fund. Riza Aziz, Red Granite’s co-founder and stepson of former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, is currently under arrest in Malaysia on money laundering charges.
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...They’ve conquered the box office. Now it’s payback time. As they are attacked by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, are TV and movie superheroes fighting a losing battle against reality?
Alan Moore’s celebrated 1986 series Watchmen revolved around a conspiracy to kill off masked vigilantes, and in effect that’s what it did in real life. Compared with the complex, mature, literary nature of Watchmen, most other comic-book titles looked juvenile and two-dimensional. This was at a time when “comic-book movies” meant Christopher Reeve’s wholesome Superman series, and when the only inhabitant of the Marvel movie universe was Howard the Duck. The entire industry had to up its game, and a new era of mature “graphic novels” was born.
Now we appear to have come full circle – which is fitting for a story so heavy with clock symbolism. With uncanny timing, HBO’s lavish new Watchmen series arrives at a moment when comic-book movies are again in what you might call a decadent phase of the cycle. They have decisively conquered our screens and our box offices, with ever grander and more improbable forms of spectacle, to the extent that we’re now beginning to question how much more of them we need. Could Watchmen kill off the superheroes once again?
Continue reading...Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and – especially – Joe Pesci turn in performances of wintry brilliance in Scorsese’s epically daring late stage mob masterpiece
Martin Scorsese returns with his best picture since GoodFellas and one of his best films ever. It’s a superbly acted, thrillingly shot epic mob procedural about violence, betrayal, dishonesty and emotional bankruptcy starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, set in a time before “toxic masculinity” had been formally diagnosed but when everyone lived with the symptoms. The film has been talked about for the hi-tech “youthification” technology which allows De Niro to appear as a younger man: it’s no more artificial than the traditional wigs, latex etc and it’s amazing how quickly you get used to it. De Niro’s eyes achieve an eerie, gluey gleam in this manifestation as a digital ghost from his past.
These are men conducting their business with sorrowful hints and shrugs and mutterings about who has gone too far, who has not shown respect, who will need to be persuaded to attend a sit-down to straighten this whole thing out. These solemnly or cordially euphemistic encounters in a subdued steakhouse light periodically explode into violence or dreamlike scenes of choreographed catastrophe, punctuated by gunshots or visceral jukebox slams on the soundtrack. And all given a queasy new resonance of political conspiracy and bad faith.
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