Australian actor tells BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs performers should be able to play any role they want
Australian actor Rebel Wilson has said the idea that “only straight actors can play straight roles and gay actors can play gay roles” is “total nonsense”.
The Pitch Perfect star, 44, spoke to radio presenter Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and was asked if women can get away with different jokes compared with men. “I’ve definitely said a lot of edgy jokes, and said them sometimes in very public places like the Baftas,” she said.
It’s a shame the cost of theatre tickets is out of the reach for so many people. Cinema is the cheaper option
A friend started working at the fancy cinema chain Everyman. One of his perks is that he gets free tickets, which can cost over £20 each.
I’ve never been, but apparently it’s a luxury experience: comfy chairs, food and drinks delivered to your seat. Still, £20 feels steep. There are London cinemas where a ticket costs less than a tenner. And surely the point of going to the cinema is to enjoy the film itself rather than the experience of watching it? But when I think about theatre tickets, my complaints dissolve. Some plays charge over £200 for a seat: £20 seems like peanuts.
Daisy Ridley stars in the true-life tale of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the Channel, in a drama that stretches the truth somewhat
You wait years for a stirring feminist true-life endurance swimming drama, then two come along within 12 months of each other. Young Woman and the Sea stars Daisy Ridley as Gertrude (Trudy) Ederle, the plucky butcher’s daughter from New York who, in 1926, became the first woman to swim the Channel. It follows Nyad, starring Annette Bening as Diana Nyad, who in 2013 swam from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64.
What we learn from watching both in relatively quick succession is that there are only so many ways that directors can inject tension into the inherently monotonous act of ploughing through the ocean for hours on end. Jellyfish peril figures prominently in both films, as does unprocessed childhood trauma. In the case of Ederle, a close brush with death as a young child battling measles means that she was subsequently treated as the runt of the family, and later her all-girl swimming team.
The Irish writer on Limerick’s hip-hop scene, the ghostly magic of the hawthorn, and escaping to the Italian Alps on YouTube
Born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1969, writer Kevin Barry, who now lives in County Sligo, won the 2007 Rooney prize for Irish literature for his short story collection There Are Little Kingdoms. In 2011, he released his debut novel, City of Bohane, which won the International Dublin literary award; his 2019 novel, Night Boat to Tangier, was longlisted for the Booker prize. His writing has appeared in publications including the New Yorker and Granta, and he also works as a playwright and screenwriter. His fourth novel, The Heart in Winter, is published by Canongate.
Actor, daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, says she rejected path of ‘changing name and getting nose job’
The Stranger Things star Maya Hawke has said she is “comfortable with not deserving” the kind of life she has.
The American actor and singer, the daughter of Hollywood actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, said her relationship with them was “positive”, which “supersedes anything anyone can say about it”.
When Charlie Higson published a new Bond novel last year, online critics accused him of turning the iconic spy into a ‘woke, libtard snowflake’ ... But he has always been a complicated character, argues the author
Which of these statements most closely represents your views about 007? A) James Bond has gone too woke; b) James Bond is a racist, sexist, imperialist dinosaur who has no place in the modern world; c) I’ve never given it much thought, really. I like the car chases, the nice locations and the stunts.
Most sensible people would pick option “c”. It’s just a bit of fun and best not to overthink it. But there are many people who are obsessed with James Bond and what he represents. Including me. And, as with fans of any cultural artefact – be it Star Wars, a football team, a music act – their biggest fans are their biggest critics. Everyone thinks they own Bond. They know what he is, who should play him in his next incarnation, how the films should be, how Bond should be. And they reserve their highest criticism for the two family firms that do actually own him – EON, which makes the films, and Ian Fleming Publications (IFP), which publishes the books. This sense of affronted ownership can perhaps best be summed up by Alan Partridge frustratedly snapping “Stop getting Bond wrong” in an oft-posted clip.
The extravagant crime drama was mishandled upon release, hacked apart by Warners Bros, but time has been kind to the fuller, bleaker version
There’s no mob whacking in movie history as gruesome as the job Warner Bros did on Sergio Leone’s final feature, Once Upon a Time in America, a sumptuous crime epic that Leone tried to cut down from 269 minutes to 229 for its premiere at the Cannes film festival in 1984, only to have 90 more minutes lopped off for its US release, taking it all the way down to 139 minutes. The changes, done without Leone’s supervision or approval, had the predictable effect of alienating critics, who’d lauded the film at Cannes, while tanking the film at the box office, and it has taken decades to restore its length and reputation. Longer cuts have circulated – a 251-minute version returned to Cannes in 2012 – but the 229-minute European cut has now become the standard, better late than never.
The excruciating irony of the situation is that time may be the film’s most important theme, and Leone’s signature style, established in classics like Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, is to elongate time as much as possible, squeezing every bit of tension and detail out of crucial moments. Through the full scope of its hero’s life – from his hardscrabble upbringing as a street tough on the Lower East Side in the 20s to his ascendence as a Prohibition-era gangster to his obsolescence as a regretful old man in the 60s — the film reflects the rotten, corruptible soul of the country itself over the same period. That’s not a story that could be told quickly. It was The Godfather for an era that had grown hostile to auteur visions.
From The Brood to Crash and new film The Shrouds, the Canadian body horror pioneer has outraged the censors and inspired countless directors
In 2021, French film-maker Julia Ducournau won the Cannes Palme d’Or with her blistering, autoerotic magnum opus Titane. It was a richly deserved victory – a celebration of a bold new voice in cinema. Yet for longstanding fans of body horror – a genre pioneered decades earlier by the Canadian writer-director David Cronenberg – it also felt like karmic payback for the festival’s botched response to Crash, Cronenberg’s controversial 1996 masterpiece, to which Titane is heavily indebted.
During a career spanning six decades and more than 20 feature films, Cronenberg, 81, has inspired everyone from Japanese auteur Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: The Iron Man) to rising British star Rose Glass (Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding). But his brilliant JG Ballard adaptation was denied its own Palme d’Or win thanks largely to the disdain of Cannes jury president Francis Ford Coppola. Instead, Crash earned a “special jury prize”, which Cronenberg called “the jury’s attempt to get around the Coppola negativity”. Speaking in 2021, on the eve of a 4K restoration of Crash, Cronenberg noted sardonically that “I’ve run into [Coppola] several times at various festivals. Always the first thing he says is: ‘Remember, we gave you this award.’ In fact, during the final closing night ceremony he wouldn’t hand me the award. He had someone else hand it to me. He wouldn’t do it himself.”
George MacKay and Léa Seydoux star in a epoch-traversing sci-fi romance, while the latest Star Wars spin-off has a mystery-thriller twist
The Beast Out now
Léa Seydoux (Blue Is the Warmest Colour) and George MacKay (Femme) star as the couple at the heart of this arthouse sci-fi epic, loosely based on Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle and spanning three time periods, from director Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance).
It will be a real shame if George Miller doesn’t get to make his mooted follow-up, The Wasteland, because of the low takings of such a creatively ambitious and oddball film as Furiosa
The film industry is obsessed with box office figures. The Tinseltown trades spend far more time focusing on whichever recent blockbuster has lost $200m than they do on the movies that pick up critical plaudits. There is a constant sense that, with such huge budgets flying around in the era of Avatar: The Way of Water ($350m, reportedly) and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ($326m, same) that the entire financial Hollywood house of cards could be about to come crashing down faster than one can mutter “massive CGI mega-budget” under one’s breath.
I was once fortunate enough to share the same rarefied air as Willem Dafoe, who asked me politely, in response to an impertinent question regarding the elevated budget of the sci-fi flick in which he had just portrayed a four-armed, green-skinned, 15ft Martian, whether I or anybody else really cared how much a movie cost. For all I know, Dafoe had trotted this one out with trademark sly and irresistible charm for every hapless interviewer that day at the Dorchester, but either way I was reminded of it this week after George Miller’s excellent Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was greeted with brickbats after only making $32m (£25m) over its debut weekend at the US box office. “Worst Memorial Day opening in three decades” screamed the Hollywood Reporter, before suggesting that Furiosa’s box office results “puts brakes on George Miller’s next Mad Max movie”.
“Are you going to light me well?” Baz Luhrmann asks when Georgia Godworth, a comedian who interviews strangers on the street, stops him in Sydney to ask about his love life.
“I think you need to put the camera – I think it is there,” the famed Australian director says while, well, directing the shoot of Godworth’s TikTok vox pop.
The drummer, DJ and Oscar-winning director is a key custodian of Black culture, with 200,000 records to prove it. So why does he think he’s getting too old for rap music?
With a sigh, Ahmir Thompson – better known as Questlove – turns his laptop around, so I can see the inside of his apartment, rather than the beautiful view of the New York skyline through the window behind him. It is a chaos of overflowing boxes and furniture covered with papers. “An ex-publicist of mine decided that they didn’t need their 8x10 photographs and old articles from the NME any more, so they gifted them to me,” he shrugs.
Thompson seems equivocal about this state of affairs. On the one hand, he can barely contain his delight: “Look at this!” he enthuses, showing me a newly acquired invite to the 1984 premiere of Prince’s Purple Rain movie. But, on the other: well, look at the place. “People are saying: ‘I got kids, but they won’t care about this stuff like you will. If this needs to go in a museum or something, I can trust you with history.’ The universe has put me in the position of keeper of the record. So, you know, be careful what you wish for.”
Hundreds of Beavers is an indie film made in six weeks for $150,000. It's like a modern combination of 20s and 30s slapstick films and live-action Looney Tunes. It's currently available on Apple and Amazon streaming platforms. A 19th century trapper battles nature and wildlife (depicted by people wearing mascot costumes) to win the hand of a furrier's daughter. It's filled with hundreds of gags. Here's the trailer, the opening, and a clip showing the costumes.
Edouard Baer says he ‘does not recognise himself’ in allegations of harassment and assault by six women
Edouard Baer, a French actor best known for playing Asterix on screen, has become the latest star to feel the impact of sexual assault allegations as his live show in Paris was cancelled.
Baer, who played the fictitious Gaul in the 2012 blockbuster Asterix and Obelix: God Save Britannia alongside Gérard Depardieu, was accused by six women of harassment and sexual assault in a joint article by online news site Mediapart and the feminist website Cheek last week.
The star hopes for some more of that Book Club magic although she’s the weakest link in a trio buoyed by Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard
The many gasps that met the $100m-plus box office total for 2018’s Book Club were not quite shared by all. The film, a frothy comedy led by four women over the age of 65, might have been an outlier at the time but it proved that once again, when smartly catered to, underserved audiences will come out en masse, a more inevitable result than many seem to think. When Bridesmaids proved this with younger women back in 2011, the industry was lethargic in its response, a wave of adjacent green lights failing to come as expected but Book Club had an instant impact, a string of grey-hued imitators in its wake.
But luck ran out a little faster than expected. Jane Fonda’s 80 for Brady and Diane Keaton’s Poms both fizzled upon release before even a Book Club sequel couldn’t lure audiences out, making less than a third of what its predecessor made. The reluctance of some older cinemagoers to return to the cinema as a result of the pandemic was an issue but so was positioning – nothing felt like an event compared with Book Club – and quality – nothing felt quite as sparky as it either. Keaton, who recently travelled to the UK for a British spin on the formula with Arthur’s Whisky, is trying her luck again with Summer Camp, a similarly lightweight tale of underused older female actors having fun on a bigger stage than they have become accustomed to.
Two years after that slap at the Oscars made him persona non grata, the Fresh Prince is making a fresh start with a return to Bad Boys. His rehabilitation seems assured – so long as his films don’t flop
In one of those dumb ironies that can abound in Hollywood, the first Will Smith movie to be greenlit since the slap in March 2022 hinges on an innocent man trying to clear his name. Previous iterations of the odd-couple, cop buddy movie Bad Boys, starring Smith and Martin Lawrence as two foul-mouthed Miami cops quibbling as they tear through traffic, have centred on missing drug busts, money laundering and Klansmen.
In the latest instalment of the franchise, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, released next week, a criminal cabal frames the errant duo, turning them into fugitives from their own police department. Because nothing signals your earnest desire to give public restitution for assaulting the host of the Oscars like a burst of automatic-weapon fire, exploding propane tanks and Lawrence doing his “Oh shit” face.
Daisy Ridley leads the reductive, if at times stirring, story of the first woman to swim across the English channel
Born to German immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York, Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle crawl-stroked her way through the American dream. In spite of great adversity – a girlhood bout of measles that left her partially deaf, protestations from her butcher father, the ingrained sexism of a country freshly considering that women may deserve the right to vote – she pursued swimming supremacy with a single-minded determination, a drive that brought her all the way across the English Channel. As the first woman to make the treacherous 21-mile journey through choppy, jellyfish-infested waters, she proved that gender has nothing to do with athletic ability, and personified the current of progress rippling out from the suffragette movement into the rest of society.
The new biopic Young Woman and the Sea presents Eberle’s life as a broadly inspiring parable of female striving and triumph, its plot points readily mapped onto any struggle to break into a boys’ club. Delayed for five years at Paramount, recast, sold off to Disney, shunted to their streaming channel and reassigned to theaters after encouraging test screenings, the most surprising aspect of this neat-and-tidy success story is how long it took to get made.
As he reaches the momentous milestone – and ahead of new movie Juror No 2 – we rate the screen icon’s best performances, from playing a poncho-clad anti-hero to having squinty showdowns in cemeteries
Against all advice, Clint Eastwood switched direction with a knockabout comedy that would be one of his biggest hits. He plays a bare-knuckle fighter who falls for a country singer, though the real romantic chemistry is between him and Clyde the orangutan. Barroom brawls aplenty! Ruth Gordon (as “Ma”) v Nazi bikers!
After Lee’ accidental on-set killing, speculation of a curse elevated this grungy revenge fantasy to cult status. Its violent, cartoonish energy still holds power
Just over 30 years ago, emerging action star Brandon Lee – son of Bruce Lee – was killed by a prop gun accident, fatally shot in the stomach on the set of this Gothamesque revenge fantasy thriller. It was a desperately sad event that generated more spurious talk of a family “curse” (Bruce died at age 32), rather than a conversation around movie location safety, which continues to be a problem to this day.
Now The Crow, which was released in 1994, a year after Brandon’s death, has been rereleased for its 30th anniversary. Brandon had largely finished filming and the movie was completed by finessing certain scenes in rewrites and using stunt doubles and digital superimposition of his face, which was camouflaged by the rainy, murky cityscapes and the eerie whiteface makeup. Now, audiences can savour once again the irony of a movie bringing its star back from the dead in a story about someone coming back from the dead. Screenwriters David J Schow and John Shirley adapted the hugely successful comic book series by James O’Barr, which drew on his real-life anguish at his fiancee being killed by a drunk driver, and also his memories of a newspaper story about a couple getting killed by a robber for their engagement ring.
Reuniting the stars of Black Narcissus, this movie about a back-room boffin attached to a bomb disposal unit finds the film-makers pushing gloriously against genre conventions
Kathleen Byron and David Farrar were unforgettable presences in the 1947 Powell and Pressburger classic Black Narcissus, playing a hysterical nun and the taciturn colonial agent with whom she is peevishly infatuated. The film-makers reunited these remarkable performers two years later for this intimate, intense wartime drama thriller; brilliant on the emotional misery, low-level dread and petty office politics of wartime government. It takes place mostly in London’s noirish darkness and rain, except for the sensational final sequence in the bright sunlight of Chesil beach in Dorset.
Adapted from an autobiographical novel by military scientist Nigel Balchin, The Small Back Room is a work that shows the film-makers pushing – brilliantly – at the conventions and constraints of a regular wartime period drama. Any number of British directors might have wanted to take on this story. But the Powell and Pressburger authorial flourishes are irresistible.
Lady Parts head for the recording studio – but new rivals are waiting in the wings. Plus: haunting memories resurface in The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Here’s what to watch this evening
10pm, Channel 4 Nida Manzoor’s rollicking comedy about an all-female Muslim punk band – complete with original bangers – is back for a second season, and Lady Parts have just finished a summer of touring. With a growing fanbase behind them, it’s time to put an album together, but the £200 profit they made won’t cover the studio time. However, bassist and newly qualified doctor Amina (Anjana Vasan) is in her “villain era” so can make anything happen. Then a rival band come to the fore with the undeniably cool name of Second Wife. Lady Parts, of course, support the sisterhood – and there’s room for more than one band of Muslim women in the industry … right? Great fun. Hollie Richardson
Her film Sisters, Saints, Sibyls made people flee and pass out when it was first shown. As it’s screened in Britain, the uncompromising artist talks about self-harm, censorship and the tragic life of her sister Barbara
Whispers, cries and accusing voices. Traumas passed down through the generations, self-harm and suicide – they are all part of Nan Goldin’s Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, a three-screen projection made exactly 20 years ago, now installed in a deconsecrated Welsh chapel in central London. “It is important that it is shown in a church,” Goldin tells me, as we sit together in her apartment in Brooklyn on a spring afternoon.
The story begins like a slide show, telling the story of Saint Barbara by way of a sequence of art-historical images. “They lock her up because of her beliefs,” explains Goldin, “and she manages to rebel and escape and she converts to Christianity and the walls weep and the holy ghost visits her. It’s a great story.” But it ends badly, with Barbara’s beheading at the hands of her father, who is then struck down by a bolt of biblical lightning.
The actor, who became the first transgender woman to win the best actress prize at Cannes, had earlier dedicated her award to ‘all the trans people who are suffering’
The first transgender woman to be awarded the best actress prize at the Cannes film festival filed a legal complaint on Wednesday over a “sexist insult” from a far-right politician after her win.
Karla Sofía Gascón and co-stars jointly received the accolade on Saturday for their performances in French auteur Jacques Audiard’s Mexico-set narco musical Emilia Perez.
A fun-filled terror yarn featuring a flesh-eating alien secretly reared by a 12-year-old that delights in cutting its teeth on the apartment block’s pets
This killer-spider-from-outer-space movie feels like a cross between Alien and TV’s Only Murders in the Building. It’s a mostly fun throwback horror comedy set in a Brooklyn apartment block where 12-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Browne) finds a spider, puts it in a jar and calls it Sting. “Awesome,” she marvels when Sting doubles in size in two hours, hungrily tapping the glass for more cockroaches to chomp on. What Charlotte doesn’t know is that her new pet is a flesh-eater recently hatched out of an asteroid that crash landed on Earth.
At the screening I attended, someone a few rows behind couldn’t hack it and walked out after a few minutes. Which is a credit to first-time feature director Kiah Roache-Turner, who pulls off a couple of moments that will make you jump out of your skin using simple shadow tricks and oh-there-it-is! shocks. But really, the film’s mood is larky, with some big laughs as Sting cuts its teeth on the building’s pets. There’s a majestic fluffy white Persian cat, and a parakeet that steals the show acting-wise with its worried face as Sting scuttles out of an air vent.
nothing, except everything. - "filmed throughout my last year of high school — to nothing and everything we feel."[1,2]
via Screentime [ungated]: "Have you heard of Wesley Wang? The 19-year-old filmmaker is adapting his viral video into a movie for Darren Aronofsky and Sony. YouTube stars Colin & Samir broke down this story (with a little help from me)."
also btw...
Master of Make-Believe [archive] - "Zach Horwitz thrived in Los Angeles—where, as one acquaintance said, 'the more you fake it, the more people actually buy it.'"
In Horwitz's fantasies, you hear echoes of the long tradition of American artifice: of Napoleon Hill, who wrote in "Think and Grow Rich" that "whatever the mind of men can conceive and believe, it can achieve," and of the clergyman Norman Vincent Peale, who declared, "As you act and persevere in acting, so you tend to become"—a principle impressed on a young real-estate scion named Donald Trump when his family attended Peale's sermons. At times, this tendency still seems strong enough to overwhelm the systems that we've developed to punish it. Even after Elizabeth Holmes was convicted, she voiced a belief that lies are just a stop on the way to truth. Asked what she thought would've happened if she had not courted so much attention, she told an interviewer, "We would've seen through our vision."
Movie Monologues That Changed My Entire Worldview - "The famous monologue at the end of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator for example, which was released well over 80 years ago in 1940, may as well have been written yesterday."[3]
I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness - not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost...
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish...
The Great Flattening - "In short, the analog world was defined by scarcity, which meant distribution of scarce goods was the locus of power; the digital world is defined by abundance, which means discovery of what you actually want to see is the locus of power. The result is that consumers have access to anything, which is to say that nothing is special; everything has been flattened."
All of Hollywood, convinced that content was what mattered, jointly killed the linear TV model to ensure that all professionally-produced content was available on-demand, even as YouTube became the biggest streamer of all with user-generated content that is delivered through the exact same distribution channel (apps on a smart device) as the biggest blockbusters.
What "Follow Your Dreams" Misses | Harvey Mudd Commencement Speech 2024 - "For those in the audience who don't know who I am, I focus on making videos about mathematics with an emphasis on visualizations. It's a weird job. I do love it though, and it's no exaggeration to describe it as a dream job. And a common cliché is for someone who is lucky enough to land in a dream job, to stand confidently in front of a group of fledgling graduates, and to compel them to follow their dreams. Frankly, on its own, I don't think this is very good advice."[4]
I don't know if you felt it yet, but today marks a day in your life when a fundamental goal changes. When you're a student, the fundamental goal is to grow, to learn, to become better. So many institutions and structures around you are there to support you in growing and learning and getting better and to reward you for doing so. In life after college, the goal changes a little, and success hinges on how effectively you're able to add value to others.
The Oscar-winning film-maker discusses his documentary about the legendary puppeteer and his unwavering desire to experiment
Before he became the world’s most famous puppeteer – the man responsible for The Muppets and Big Bird; and turning David Bowie into the Goblin King in Labyrinth – Jim Henson was an experimental film-maker.
In his Oscar-nominated 1965 short, Time Piece, Henson stars as a man transcending time and space, the percussive beats of ticking clocks, heartbeats and other machinery creating the rhythms for the film’s montage. In a film that takes cues from Georges Méliès and Dziga Vertov, Henson goes from playing hospital patient to Tarzan to George Washington. He was a man who could seemingly be anyone, and do anything, much like Henson himself.
John Rosman’s effective debut intertwines the lives of a woman escaping a black-site facility and a woman hired to contain the outbreak
Amid the dumper-truck of post-Covid lockdown-inspired films, very few take disease and pandemics themselves as their central focus (maybe after rewatching Contagion, we were all too eager to forget). So John Rosman’s stripped-back but effective debut is a sobering flashback to those incubative early days, its title punning its title punning on the microbe that asymptomatic protagonist Jessica (Hayley Erin) is carrying on her person, as well as her hopes for a fresh start, unharassed by government spooks, north of the Canadian border.
All we know at the start is that blood-splattered Jessica has just escaped imprisonment in some black-site facility. She bundles herself into a pickup heading north, which luckily belongs to kindly farmer Frank (Blaine Palmer), who sends her on her way with a new jacket and a rucksack full of tinned food. Rosman makes gradual sense of this chaotic getaway by drip-feeding us the recent past: how a cute collie pitched up at Jessica and her boyfriend’s campsite, then shortly afterwards the latter broke out into terrifying boils and welts.
Ruddy, born in Canada, produced more than 30 movies, and was on hand for the very top and very bottom
Albert S Ruddy, a colorful, Canadian-born producer and writer who won Oscars for The Godfather and Million Dollar Baby, developed the raucous prison-sports comedy The Longest Yard and helped create the hit sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, has died at age 94.
Ruddy died “peacefully” Saturday at the UCLA medical center, according to a spokesperson, who added that among his final words were: “The game is over, but we won the game.”
The house in Winnetka, Illinois still features the staircase which Macaulay Culkin rode down on a sledge, but the swinging paint cans have since been removed
Cinema fans – and burglars – alert: the home made famous by 1990 film Home Alone is on the market, with a sale price of $5.25m (£4.1m).
The five bedroom, six bathroom mansion at 671 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, Illinois forms the key setting for the bulk of Chris Columbus’s festive hit, as 10-year-old Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) fends off the break-in efforts of villains played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, after his parents inadvertently leave him unattended over the holidays.
Ham-fisted thriller about a CIA operative flung into a world of pain when he finds out his late wife may have been a Russian agent lacks any subtlety or intrigue
Judging by his recent filmography, Aaron Eckhart is making a play for the Liam Neeson “geri-action” market. This latest thriller, directed by straight-to-streaming action kingpin Jesse V Johnson, is pitched close to Charles Bronson territory, with the perma-scowled Eckster speaking in a menacing lean-in whisper, and at one point telegraphing his status as a grief-stricken widow/ticking timebomb by slumping against the cold-cuts fridge in the supermarket.
Eckhart plays CIA operative and outgoing Budapest bureau head Benjamin Malloy, whose Algerian wife Farrah (Laëtitia Eido) is about to take over from him before she is killed in a restaurant bombing on their anniversary. Catapulted into a world of pain, he’s nudged closer to the edge when internal affairs later identify Farrah as a possible Russian double agent. Due to meet up with his son (Chris Petrovski) in Croatia, he opts for a stop-off in his old Hungarian stomping ground to nose around what exactly his other half was up to, starting with whether she was actually in cahoots with his FSB opposite number Evgeny (Nick Moran).
The actor took to the stage in a dress backed by Taylor Swift’s Love Story, then reportedly made a number of sexist and transphobic comments
A cinema in Massachusetts has apologised to the audience at a special screening of Jaws and a Q&A with its star, Richard Dreyfuss, who reportedly made a number of sexist and transphobic comments.
Appearing at the Cabot theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts on 25 May, Dreyfuss took to the stage in a house dress to a background track of Taylor Swift’s Love Story, shaking his hips suggestively and brandishing his walking stick like a baseball bat.
The actor suggests her extraordinary stage, film and TV career has come to an end due to age-related macular degeneration
Judi Dench has suggested she has retired from acting because of her worsening eyesight. Asked by a reporter over the weekend at the Chelsea flower show if she had plans for future roles, Dench responded: “No, no, I can’t even see!”
Representatives for the actor, 89, have indicated that there is nothing further to add. In Chelsea, Dench continued by saying she did have other projects in the pipeline, saying: “Our book has come out [Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent], we’re going to Cheltenham book fair and then I’m going to do three shows with Gyles Brandreth.”
From the love/hate setup and the must-dump boyfriend to the kooky mate and frantic finale this well-crafted love story hits all the classic romcom beats, just don’t expect fireworks
Based on Sophie Cousens’ novel of the same name, and adapted for the screen by the author, this opens with a twinkly tourism-office-style visit-London-for-the-festive-season montage that lets us know from the off that the film will be playing by 1990s romcom rules. You know the sort of thing: a declaration of love delivered against a pressing deadline ideally involving a change of location. As This Time Next year progresses, it quickly becomes apparent that said rules have been thoroughly studied, to mostly satisfying effect, as from the get-go the story hits the expected beats. You’ve got heroine Minnie’s initial antagonism towards her love-match Quinn, a loser boyfriend who must first be seen through and ditched, and of course heartwarming subplots involving careers and family. And getting to see the comforting formula followed faithfully is exactly why you would want to watch the movie, so it’s a job well done.
The actors have been taking notes from the same playbook as the script. Lead Sophie Cookson gives us a very plausible blend of Renée Zellweger and Keira Knightley mannerisms circa the early 2000s. Lucien Laviscount smoulders effectively as the almost-too-perfect leading man. Will Hislop continues the consistently fun work he’s been doing in a small role as the dickhead boyfriend (no British actor is embodying millennial bell-end quite as skilfully right now). One real highlight, who will hopefully see more work off the back of their turn here, is a relative unknown: Charlie Oscar, who knocks it out of the park in a small role as a bakery assistant who somehow sits in the precise middle of a Venn diagram between Bubble from Absolutely Fabulous and the Emily Blunt character in The Devil Wears Prada.
In 2007, a big-screen version of the hit video game was announced, but it languished in development limbo. What happened, and what does it mean for Margot Robbie’s new adaptation?
When the news came out that Margot Robbie is set to produce a movie based on the iconic life-simulation video game, The Sims, many people’s first response was: “How the heck do you make a movie out of The Sims?” It may be one of the bestselling game series of all time but, crucially, it doesn’t really have any plot to work with. The entire point is that it’s a sandbox life sim, and players can do whatever they want.
This has all happened before. In 2007, it was announced that a movie based on The Sims was coming to the big screen, with what was then 20th Century Fox (now 20th Century Studios) acquiring the rights. It was written by Brian Lynch, who has become the Hollywood screenwriter of choice for some of the past decade’s biggest and most critically acclaimed family animations, including Puss in Boots (2011), Minions (2015) and Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022), and The Secret Life of Pets movies.
Billed as a gen Z road trip film, the Ross brothers’ first fiction feature offers more than you’d expect from the genre, with a focus on human interaction over plot
In the opening seconds of the Ross brothers’ new film, a teenager professes his hope to discover a place “weirdos” like him can call home. The opening raises doubts about the novelty of what might follow: the trope of the high school outsider has been endlessly revisited. Gasoline Rainbow – billed as a gen Z road trip movie – starts off by replaying familiar images. As new high school graduates Makai, Micah, Nathaly, Nichole and Tony hit the road across Oregon for one final adventure together, we see the usual trappings of the genre: sing-alongs, parties by the campfire, and leaning out of car windows to enjoy the breeze and sweet call of freedom.
We move into welcome new territory when a mishap leaves their van out of action, and the group are left in the hot desert trying to scrounge a path forward, meeting strangers along the way. Directors Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross are known for blending nonfiction and fiction, and their loose, free-ranging cinéma vérité style. While Gasoline Rainbow is their first fiction feature, there are elements that nod to their DIY sensibilities: the teenagers are first-time actors, share the same names as their characters, and scenes were partly improvised. The result is a movie in the tradition of “vibes” film-making, less interested in a propulsive plot than exploring the revealing and delightful moments that arise from spontaneous human interactions. The group tells onlookers that they have no plan for their journey. It is a fitting statement for the film itself, which ambles along gently, happy to be pulled in new directions, seeing what treasures emerge by chance.
American film-maker best known for his acclaimed 2004 documentary Super Size Me
Few film-makers can say that their work has made a change to the real world, but Morgan Spurlock had a stronger claim than most. His 2004 documentary Super Size Me, an exposé of how the fast food industry was fuelling America’s obesity epidemic, appeared to have direct repercussions for the world’s largest fast food chain, McDonald’s.
Shortly before the film came out in May that year, the company introduced its Go Active! menu, which included salad items; six weeks after its release, the company abolished its supersize portions entirely.
Hollywood star’s claim ChatGPT update used an imitation of her voice highlights tensions over rapidly accelerating technology
When OpenAI’s new voice assistant said it was “doing fantastic” in a launch demo this month, Scarlett Johansson was not.
The Hollywood star said she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that the updated version of ChatGPT, which can listen to spoken prompts and respond verbally, had a voice “eerily similar” to hers.
Shot over 15 years between Denmark and Pakistan, the film-maker captures day-to-day life in Karachi, and explores how freedom and human rights are not doled out equally
Shot over the course of 15 years, Anita Mathal Hopland’s documentary provides a cinematic bridge between two countries. Born in Denmark to a Norwegian mother and a Pakistani father, the director lived in Copenhagen yet found herself unmoored between cultures. Camera in hand, Hopland makes several trips to Moosa Lane, the street in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, where 25 members of her father’s family share a single dwelling. Through her lens, she lovingly documents the colourful day-to-day lives of her relatives. In the face of diasporic longing, the act of filming embodies a desire to connect and set roots in a world divided by borders.
Focusing on three of her family members, Hopland’s film also observes changing cultural attitudes among Pakistani youths. Readying herself for an arranged marriage, Hopland’s niece Saima is content to follow tradition. Meanwhile, Alishba, who was only two years old when shooting started, has grown into a spirited teen who dreams of pursuing financial and professional independence. A ball of energy, Alishba approaches the dangerous streets and the beautiful open beaches with the same zest for adventure. As Hopland’s camera zigzags between Karachi and Denmark, the montage articulates how the idea of free movement is reserved only for the privileged. Her journeys to Pakistan had always been one-sided, as it was nearly impossible for her relatives to travel to Europe, for economic and visa reasons.
With new chapters in the worlds of Mad Max and Planet of the Apes out now, Guardian writers have picked their favourite big screen franchises to date
When a blockbuster franchise is seven movies in (and counting), and the consensus choice for worst entry was directed by John Woo, arguably the most influential action film-maker of his time, you’re looking at an uncommonly consistent series. Though the Mission: Impossible movies have cycled through many directors – one apiece for Brian De Palma, Woo, JJ Abrams and Brad Bird, before settling on Christopher McQuarrie – the first film, particularly the astounding Langley break-in sequence, established the franchise as a showcase for impeccable crafted set pieces. The plots may be an enjoyably hokey tangle of global threats and clever unmaskings, but the series’ determination to keep topping itself, leaning on the physicality of stunt work and practical effects, has provided reliable thrills for approaching three decades. With each film, Tom Cruise continues to outrun his own mortality and another classic sequence or two is added to the inventory, from Cruise dangling from the Burj Khalifa high-rise during a sandstorm in Ghost Protocol to him zipping off a cliff on a motorcycle in Dead Reckoning Part One. It’s a high-wire act that has yet to tumble off the line. Scott Tobias
Furry critters and house elves run riot in this annoying kids’ movie, which is heavy on snarky dialogue but low on charm
Made in Russia in 2022, this animated flick has been dubbed in American English for global release, but it seems unlikely that it made much difference one way or another to what is a hectic, charmless and generally annoying piece of family entertainment.
The storyline concerns Finns, a sort of house-elf or goblin, whose stated narrative function is to help human households run more efficiently, and whose function in practice is to be incredibly irritating. The most infuriating one is our hero, Finnick, who, in addition to a grating array of Scooby-Doo style non-verbal vocalisations, comes out with lots of lines that have the cadence of a witticism without actually being funny. You know the sort of thing: “I can’t believe I signed up for this!” or “Where do my tax dollars go?” It’s the brand of sub-Garfield humour whereby the idea of a furry critter paying or indeed being aware of the concept of tax dollars poses fraudulently as a rib-tickler.
It was the year when arthouse brains met Hollywood brawn. But what made the last 12 months of the 90s so special? These films tell the story
In 1999, cinemagoers flocked to watch The Talented Mr Ripley, in which Jude Law smoked cigarettes in a lazily buttoned linen shirt. The same year, they could also watch the actor getting a socket stamped into the base of his spine so he could play a video game. In David Cronenberg’s Existenz, Law’s character is fitted with a gnarly looking “UmbyCord” and hooked up to a creepy, pulsing virtual reality game “pod” that mines his nervous system for data as he plays. While plugged in, the player is unable to take stock of the “real” world outside. “You won’t be able to stop yourself, so you might as well enjoy it,” says the game’s creator, a line that feels spookily resonant today.
I am certainly not the firstperson to notice that 1999 was a great year for film. At the time, Entertainment Weekly ran a piece with the headline: 1999: The Year That Changed Movies, declaring it the year “all the old, boring rules about cinema started to crumble”. It’s not that films such as The Virgin Suicides, The Sixth Sense and Fight Club are better than everything else that came before or after, but that 1999’s harvest was a bumper crop. That year’s freakish climate saw cross-pollination between Hollywood studios with money and independent-minded film-makers with vision. It was a period that saw cinema creating the culture instead of second-guessing it.
Flashbacks reveal an all-consuming bond when two friends reunite at a hen night in a country cottage
Filled with luscious shades of pastel pinks, blues and greens, the warm colour palette of Jaclyn Bethany’s latest feature blushes with the heady glow of summer. Like a bruised fruit, however, the sugary imagery belies unexpected notes of bitterness, as the film plumbs the complex depths of female relationship and the everlasting spell of first love. Led by an all-female cast, the mood is beguilingly woozy, even conspiratorial.
Friends in their teens as dance students, Scarlet (Amber Anderson) and Jo (Greta Bellamacina) reunite as adults for the latter’s hen night at a countryside cottage. Other guests will soon arrive, but much of the film hinges on the palpable tension and intimacy between the two women. Nearly opposite in temperament – Scarlet is reserved while Jo is more flamboyant – the pair finds their life paths have starkly diverged in terms of love and career. Resentment and hurt float to the surface, as flashbacks reveal that their all-consuming bond in the past has also been a romantic one. Their nostalgic conversations are dotted with stolen glances and hesitant pauses. They encapsulate that very specific push and pull between once-close confidants, who struggle to perceive each other with fresh eyes.
He starred in Peep Show, Green Wing and Wonka – and his first novel won an award. Now the star is making operas with 64 homeless people. Not bad going for someone who was written off by his teachers
Paterson Joseph is, by his own admission, an unlikely opera librettist. He had turned 50 by the time he got round to going to one, and only went because he was in it, as the “crazy” voice of God in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. “It’s not my world,” says the actor. But therein lies part of his mission: as a black Londoner written off by the school system, his life was transformed by the goldmine he discovered while truanting down at his local library.
One of his discoveries, as “a melancholy teen”, was Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin. “I remember getting it out of the library,” he says, “just because it was a small book. And I started reading this poem out loud, at night in my bedroom. And I laughed – but I was also frightened and frustrated, weeping at the tragedy of it. When I closed the book, it was dawn.”
Marija Kavtaradze’s affecting film explores the relationship between a passionately physical woman and a man who is asexual
Two people can be seemingly made for each other and still find themselves out of kilter in a relationship. The attraction between dancer Elena (Greta Grinevičiūte) and sign language interpreter Dovydas (Kęstutis Cicėnas) is immediate. Elena is sensual and physically expressive, both professionally and in her many relationships. Dovydas, meanwhile, is asexual. But the fact that he doesn’t need or even want to have sex with Elena doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to be in a relationship with her.
It takes a bit of getting used to, but for a while it seems that love might conquer all, even the fundamental differences in their needs. Tensions between them are evocatively captured in this Lithuanian drama: an awkward, uneasy coupling between the pair is kept in a restrained mid shot, but the sequence that follows, showing Elena dancing with two colleagues, is filmed so intimately in closeup that the sweat and skin almost becomes abstract. The second feature film from director Marija Kavtaradze (Summer Survivors), Slow is terrific – an honest and affecting portrait of an atypical romance.
Co-writer with his brother of some of the great film musical songs including classics for Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book
Richard Sherman, who has died aged 95, often said that he never realised his youthful ambition to write “the great American symphony”. However, with his brother, Robert Sherman, he co-wrote songs that provided the soundtrack for a generation’s childhood – upbeat numbers with a homespun philosophy typified by lines such as “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”.
Those words were written for the brothers’ greatest triumph, the Oscar-winning Mary Poppins (1964), for which they created a score of staggering brilliance: haunting ballads, lilting lullabies, roistering marches, energetic dance numbers and knockabout vaudeville tunes. Half of the songs instantly became standards – not just the Oscar-winning Chim Chim Cher-ee but also A Spoonful of Sugar, Feed the Birds, Jolly Holiday and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Voiced by Samuel L Jackson and Chris Pratt, this latest animated take on the plus-sized moggy is the cat’s whiskers
It’s a bit of a monkeys and typewriters situation: if you make enough Garfield movies, eventually one will turn out to be worth watching. This animated take on the adventures of the plus-sized ginger sourpuss is a refreshing step up from the lazy, lasagne-based humour of the live(ish) action versions. Directed by Mark Dindal (The Emperor’s New Groove) and co-written by David Reynolds (Finding Nemo), Paul A Kaplan and Mark Torgove, this feline adventure combines a frantic, Looney Tunes energy with some genuinely sharp comedy. Garfield (Chris Pratt) is reunited with his estranged father Vic (Samuel L Jackson) and discovers that he has inherited more than just a taste for Italian food.
George Miller’s world-building spectacle is an assault on the senses that’s given a human heart by its remarkable star
“The question is: do you have it in you to make it epic?” Garrulous and utterly deranged despot Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is making small talk with Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is in no mood for idle chatter. The moment comes towards the end of the movie; by this point in the film, Furiosa is a single-minded, flint-eyed avenger with a customised power tool for an arm. It’s a great line, which Hemsworth delivers with a lip-smacking relish. But given the barnstorming action onslaught that has preceded the exchange, it’s a question that is probably redundant. This is a George Miller picture, after all. Epic is all part of a day’s work. But even by the standards of the previous films in the Mad Max series (Fury Road is the closest in tone, but there are marked differences between the two pictures), this is a huge, marauding monster of a movie. See it on the biggest screen if you can; let the thunderous rumble of customised war rigs shake your seats, and the sandblasted angry ochre colour palette grind itself into your pores.
As the title suggests, we follow the backstory of Furiosa, the character played in Fury Road by Charlize Theron. Here, she’s performed as a child by Alyla Browne and as a young woman by Taylor-Joy. On the physical resemblance alone, it’s superb casting – the two look almost uncannily similar. Beyond that, they are both independently impressive in the role. Browne lets us see the wily calculation beneath the shell of trauma in the little girl ripped from her mother and her community and forced to see things no child should witness. And Taylor-Joy is a pleasure to watch in the action sequences, which take up probably 90% of the film. Her lithe agility and cunning is a refreshing counterpoint to all the lumbering muscle and firepower. She’s tiny in comparison with most of the cast, but give her a grappling hook and a set of wheels and you genuinely believe she could best any of them.
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