New Zealand film-maker became a Hollywood fixture in the 90s and 00s, including making Pierce Brosnan’s last 007 movie, before returning to his home country
Lee Tamahori, the New Zealand director of Once Were Warriors and Die Another Day, has died aged 75.
In a statement to Radio New Zealand, Tamahori’s family said he had Parkinson’s and died “peacefully at home”.
Continue reading...Nick Croydon, the CEO of QBD Books, has faced criticism for his thriller The Turing Protocol
A novel written by a prominent book industry figure in which persecuted gay man Alan Turing has sex with a woman and fathers a child has been criticised online for its portrayal of the codebreaker.
The Turing Protocol was released in July and was written by Nick Croydon, the CEO of QBD Books, the largest Australian-owned bookshop chain, where the book is being heavily promoted.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Oxford’s Bodleian libraries to put archive items on display for first time, celebrating spy author’s ‘tradecraft’
The extent of John le Carré’s meticulous research and attention to detail are among insights into his working methods that will be revealed when the master of spy thrillers’ private archive goes on display for the first time this autumn.
His classic cold war-era espionage novels have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and inspired acclaimed films and television adaptations.
Continue reading...The prolific performer played varied roles – from arms dealer to baseball star – and made the rare switch from Bond villain to Bond good guy
Tough-guy actor Joe Don Baker, a prolific performer in movies as varied as GoldenEye, Cape Fear and Mud, as well as the BBC TV series Edge of Darkness, has died aged 89.
Born in 1936, Baker grew up in small town Texas, and studied business administration at North Texas State College. After a period in the army, Baker moved to New York and joined the Actors’ Studio in the early 1960s, where he was a contemporary of Rip Torn. Baker made his Broadway debut in 1963 with the Actors’ Studio company, appearing in Marathon ’33, about the dance marathons of the Great Depression, and made his film debut in an uncredited role in 1967 in Cool Hand Luke. He also appeared in numerous TV series, including the pilot episode of a western show called Lancer in 1968, the making of which was fictionalised by Quentin Tarantino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in Baker’s role.
Continue reading...Prolific Canadian director also made one of the country’s first internationally successful films, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, starring Richard Dreyfuss
Ted Kotcheff, the prolific Canadian director of films including First Blood, Weekend at Bernie’s, Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, has died aged 94. His daughter Kate Kotcheff told the Canadian Press that he had died of heart failure on Thursday in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, where he lived. His son Thomas said: “He died of old age, peacefully, and surrounded by loved ones.”
In an amazingly varied career, Kotcheff’s work ranged from hardhitting TV plays and low-budget features in the UK, to hit Hollywood comedies and prestige-laden award-winners and cult films. Kate Kotcheff said: “He was an amazing storyteller. He was an incredible, larger than life character [and] he was a director who could turn his hand to anything.”
Continue reading...Bestselling author and Netflix producer said extensive early experience of grief was ‘very cruel but effective teacher’
American thriller writer Harlan Coben said experiencing “quite a bit of tragedy” in his 20s made him a better writer.
The bestselling author, who wrote the Myron Bolitar thriller series and novels turned Netflix shows such as Fool Me Once and Missing You, said he was in his 20s when his father died of a heart attack at the age of 59 in 1988.
Continue reading...Scene which has long been the holy grail for fans will feature in a new box set marking the 50th anniversary of the star’s death
Long-lost unseen footage of the celebrated “log fight” scene from the Bruce Lee film Game of Death is to be released in a new box set marking the 50th anniversary of the famed actor and martial artist’s death.
Lee, who shot to fame around the world with the 1973 film Enter the Dragon, died on 20 July 1973 before he could complete shooting on Game of Death, which eventually emerged in 1978, incorporating some of the original footage in a largely reshot and rewritten version.
Continue reading...Famously suave actor’s family selling items ranging from Lamborghini skis to luxury watches, cufflinks and numerous silk ties
If you ever wanted to dress, schuss or tell the time like James Bond, now might be your only chance: a selection of items including dinner suits, silk cravats, Lamborghini skis and a special edition Omega Seamaster watch are up for auction, all from the personal collection of 007 himself, Roger Moore.
Moore, who died in 2017, played Bond in seven films between 1973 and 1985, beginning with Live and Let Die and ending with A View to a Kill. His family are selling 180 lots of Moore’s own memorabilia, with part of the proceeds going to the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), which appointed Moore as a goodwill ambassador in 1991.
Continue reading...Star of The Wire and Luther says playing 007 would be the pinnacle of an actor’s career, but the discussion became ‘off-putting’
Idris Elba has said that the racist backlash to the prospect of him being cast as James Bond “made the whole thing disgusting and off-putting”.
Elba was speaking on the SmartLess podcast about the continued speculation linking him to the role, saying: “I was super complimented for a long time about this. We’re all actors and we understand that role is one of those coveted [roles] … Being asked to be James Bond [would be] like: ‘OK, you’ve sort of reached the pinnacle’. That’s one of those things the whole world has a vote in.”
Continue reading...Strand Magazine will publish Blackmail, a tale of a blind Korean war veteran, found by New York editor Andrew Gulli
A New York editor and literary detective is celebrating the discovery and release of an unpublished short story by James M Cain, one of the greats of American noir, a “poet of the tabloid murder” whose works made famous on film include The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce.
“For all the work that you do,” said Andrew Gulli, editor-in-chief of the Strand Magazine, “like 2% of the time you hit the jackpot. I just feel so good. It’s worth it.”
Continue reading...With no Moneypenny and no M, a previously unpublished script reveals the author’s original ideas for Moonraker
In the action-packed film Moonraker, James Bond escapes from Jaws, the metal-toothed villain, on a hang-glider that ejects from a speedboat just as he drives over the precipice of a waterfall. It is one of numerous outlandish scenes in the film that Ian Fleming never wrote in his original 007 novel. And it could not be more different to the author’s own version of the film, according to a previously unpublished script.
In 1956, a year after the Moonraker novel was published, Fleming wrote his own 150-page film treatment with a plot that is as serious as the 1979 film is lightweight, despite Roger Moore’s charm as the fictional spy.
Continue reading...A gig worker turns to credit card fraud in a tense debut feature with an electrifying central performance
It’s hard to really blame Emily (Aubrey Plaza) for choosing a life of crime. A low-paid service gig brings nothing but stress. A seemingly inescapable student loan is gathering interest by the day. A couple of minor, years-back criminal charges have closed off a world of employment. It’s a familiar predicament that plagues many in America and even though first-time writer-director John Patton Ford might only show it in the broadest of strokes, it’s an effectively infuriating set-up.
When Emily is offered an opportunity for an extra income, she nervously inches down the rabbit hole. It starts off simple. She’s given a cloned credit card and has to buy a TV. She then takes it to her new bosses and gets paid $200. It’s easier than she anticipated and soon she’s doing it on the regular, edging closer to taskmaster Youcef (Theo Rossi) who slowly becomes more than her mentor. But how far is she willing to go?
Emily the Criminal is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced
Continue reading...A Senegalese immigrant nanny battles micro-aggressions and otherworldly forces in a novel yet loosely assembled debut
It’s remarkable how infrequently modern-day domestic workers are portrayed as fully formed characters in TV and film, given their ubiquity and necessity in the lives of so many. Perhaps part of that is because “the help” isn’t meant to be noticed (the flamboyant Fran Fine notwithstanding) or that the lives of low-wage people of color, many of whom are immigrants, haven’t traditionally piqued the interest of privileged Hollywood. When domestic workers do see screen time, it’s often through the gaze of the privileged.
Enter film-maker Nikyatu Jusu, whose mother, an immigrant from Sierra Leone, had been a domestic worker. Raised in Atlanta, the young Jusu watched her parent “put her dreams to the side to be a peripheral mother in other mother’s narratives”.
Nanny is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced
Continue reading...Rare response from Richard Moore comes after state news agency posted video mocking western intelligence
Britain’s spy chief has thanked China’s state news agency for “free publicity” after it posted a James Bond spoof that mocked the western intelligence community’s growing focus on threats posed by Beijing.
The rare response by the head of MI6, Richard Moore, on Thursday comes as China and Britain clash over Beijing’s treatment of its Uyghur minority and creeping authoritarianism in the former British colony of Hong Kong.
Continue reading...The off-the-leash cop archetype was cemented with Don Siegel’s taut, provocative thriller that neither condemns or condones extreme measures
Harry Callahan is the cop we’ve been warned about. Though this week marks fifty years since Don Siegel’s genre-defining thriller Dirty Harry busted into cinemas with Smith & Wessons blazing, the general profile of dangerous, off-the-leash law enforcement solidified over the last half-decade of public discourse sounds like it could’ve been traced from the film’s example. Played with a scowl of blanket disgust by Clint Eastwood – Paul Newman had passed on the role as “too right-wing” – San Francisco PD’s top inspector is more than your standard-issue misanthrope. He’s an equal-opportunity bigot, contemptuous of every ethnic group rattled off by a fellow officer in a laundry list of slurs. He’ll readily resort to violence in his work, not above a bit of crude torture to extract information from a perp with a bullet wound. And most hazardous of all, he believes himself unanswerable to anyone but God, who he’d probably just meet with the same glowering frown.
From its earliest stages of development, the script conceived by husband-and-wife team Harry and Rita Fink made clear that Harry’s no boy Scout, but partisans on either side of the ideological aisle looking for affirmation in their stance will be disappointed. Those with hopes for an out-and-out denunciation of this brutish approach to policing have another thing coming, the coarser methods often validated by necessity, as if Harry’s the last line of defense for a society teetering on the brink of anarchy. (The guy can’t even get a hot dog without a bank robbery demanding his attention.) Any gung-ho types walking away as converted Calla-fans have also missed something crucial, however, blind to his placelessness in the city he’s sworn to protect. Neither condemning nor condoning his actions, the film offers what may be the clearest image of the archetypal cop’s self-perception as the only one willing to do the dirty jobs holding America together, even if it means getting dirty yourself.
Continue reading...Shaped by her father’s early life in apartheid South Africa, the actor brings political awareness to all of her roles, from Black Mirror and The Morning Show to the new BBC thriller The Girl Before
As those of us who have spent more time than usual at home over the last couple of years will know, those four walls can be a sanctuary, prison or, at times, both. Beautiful, monolithic and eerily empty, the house in the new BBC/HBO drama The Girl Before is definitely both. “The house,” says Gugu Mbatha-Raw with a laugh, “is the real star.” At one point in the first episode, Mbatha-Raw’s character Jane appears to have developed an intense relationship with it, caressing its smooth stone and glass.
In The Girl Before, adapted from the bestselling psychological thriller by JP Delaney, Jane passes a rigorous vetting process before being allowed to rent this minimalist dream home. In return for cheap rent, she has to agree to around 200 strange and stringent rules set by the architect and owner. “No books?” she says, incredulous, when the estate agent reels off some of the stipulations (no pictures, no ornaments, “no children, obviously”). Jane will be watched, her every move and metric monitored, even her moods influenced, by the technologically advanced house and its creepy creator. She soon finds out that she is the second tenant – and she makes a chilling discovery about the first, Emma (played by Jessica Plummer).
Continue reading...Claustrophic tale of a woman falling apart in her flat is familiar territory, but told here with fresh panache
Documentary-maker Frida Kempff makes her feature debut with a Swedish-set thriller drenched in urban paranoia. Molly (Cecilia Milocco), who has recently finished a stay at a psychiatric hospital following a personal tragedy, has moved into a new flat hoping for a fresh start. The plan proves futile: she is soon plagued by mysterious, relentless sounds of knocking coming from her ceiling. Convinced that someone is being hurt, Molly is determined to trace the origin of this mysterious cry for help, only to be faced with others’ disbelief and her own deteriorating sanity.
Such a premise is by no means novel – apartment angst has been done to death since at least the mid-60s, after Polanski’s Repulsion – yet the eerie visuals and Milocco’s heart-wrenching performance elevate Knocking above its otherwise thin plot. Set during a scorching heatwave, the film beautifully pairs the restlessness of the summer with Molly’s own wandering mind, which scissors back and forth between her claustrophobic present and sun-drenched memories of a former lover on the beach. Natural light only exists in these aching echoes of the past. Mostly shot inside Molly’s flat, the imagery is smothered in jaundiced fluorescent tones, only accentuating her isolation and worsening state of mind.
Continue reading...Slasher fantasy and ghostly magic collide in Edgar Wright’s heady thriller about a fashion student who is mysteriously transported into the life of a 60s nightclub singer
“It’s not what you imagine, London,” says Rita Tushingham in this deliciously twisted love letter to Britain’s cinematic pop-culture past. Director and co-writer Edgar Wright, whose CV runs from the rural action-comedy Hot Fuzz to the recent dramatic music doc The Sparks Brothers, has cheekily described Last Night in Soho as “Peeping Tom’s Midnight Garden”, a mashup of seedy Soho nostalgia and melancholy magic. Making superb use of its West End and Fitzrovia locations, and boasting a cast that includes Terence Stamp (cutting a silhouette that weirdly recalls William Hartnell’s Doctor Who) and Diana Rigg in her final role, it’s a head-spinning fable that twists from finger-snapping retro fun to giallo-esque slasher fantasy as it dances through streets paved not with gold but with glitter, grit and splashes of stabby gore.
Thomasin McKenzie, who dazzled in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, is Eloise Turner, a wide-eyed, 60s-obsessed fashion student with a “gift” that leaves her haunted by Don’t Look Now-style visions of her dead mother. Having earned a place at the London College of Fashion, “Ellie” finds herself in a top-floor bedsit from whence she is nightly transported back into the capital’s swinging past through the ghostly mirrored-life of wannabe singer Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). In her dreams, Ellie (who says the 60s “speak to me”) both watches and becomes Sandie, aiming for the stars but falling to the streets as the meat-hook realities of London life hit home. Is Sandie a figment of Ellie’s overheated imagination – a wish-fulfilment turned into a nightmare - or has she somehow made a genuine connection across generations?
Continue reading...Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith star in a horror-thriller that takes a trip to the sleazy heart of London’s past
A trip to the dark heart of London’s unswinging 60s is what’s on offer in this entertaining, if uneven, film from screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns and director Edgar Wright, serving up a gorgeous soundtrack and some marvellous re-creations of sleazy Soho and the West End. There’s a tremendous image of the marquee for the 1965 Thunderball premiere in Coventry Street, and a show-stopping crane shot of Soho Square, apparently filmed from where the 20th Century Fox sign is now no longer to be found atop that company’s former premises.
Last Night in Soho is a doppelganger horror-thriller about a wide-eyed fashion student called Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) who has brought her mum’s old Dansette record player and Cilla Black and Petula Clark LPs up to London from Cornwall on the train. Eloise has a fetish for the lost innocent glamour of the 60s but, moping all alone in her manky bedsit, finds herself stricken with neon phantasms. Like a ghost from the future, Eloise dreams her way through a portal in time back into 60s London clubland, where she witnesses Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a blonde singer – exactly the kind of retro showbiz princess Eloise moonily idolises – who is being forced by her slick-haired manager Jack (Matt Smith) into having sex for money with creepy old men. Gradually, Eloise feels her identity merging with Sandie’s. Is she having a breakdown, or is this nightmare really happening?
Continue reading...With his final turn as James Bond in No Time to Die filling cinemas, the actor takes questions from readers and fellow actors about the role, from being smacked around his nether regions to getting over his fear of heights
Most movie stars look tiny up close. Action lads especially. You can’t stop thinking: Vin Diesel is dinky! Statham’s a titch! Am I actually taller than Fassbender?
Daniel Craig is different. He doesn’t loom, but he is bulky. Stonehenge legs, whacking hands, just right for killing a man or mending a washing machine.
Continue reading...