‘Put an end to this war’: Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev makes new plea to Putin

After winning the Grand Prix at Cannes film festival, the exiled auteur sent a direct message to the Russian president urging him to stop the war Accoladed director Andrey Zvyagintsev has sent a direct message to Vladimir Putin urging him to start listening to the Russian people and end the “senseless” war in Ukraine, continuing a war of words between Russia’s most revered living film-maker and the Kremlin that started at the Cannes film festival awards ceremony over the weekend. “Except for the limbs torn off from your fellow citizens in the name of an illusory goal, except for the massacre of young people that the country needs to build life and the future – nothing good is on the horizon if we don’t stop,” the exiled auteur said in a message sent to the Russian president’s press secretary through official channels on Tuesday. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/Sp9enha via IFTTT

Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose review – mysterious mammal in period hoax yarn

Peculiar true story of 1930s media sensation becomes an even odder, laboriously serious drama featuring Simon Pegg with Freudian facial hair

Here is a peculiar film based on a peculiar real-life case: the “talking mongoose” hoax that became a newspaper sensation in the 1930s, the crop circle story of its day. The Irvings, a farming family in the Isle of Man, claimed there was a mongoose called Gef in their farmhouse that could speak – although no independent observer ever saw the creature, but only heard its bizarre voice in the walls or under the floorboards. The obvious explanation was close at hand: the daughter of the family made no secret of being a talented ventriloquist.

Despite this, it amused the press to maintain a deadpan attitude to the possibility of “Gef” being real, and there was no shortage of credulous and excitable spiritualists who were excited by the idea. One was the Hungarian-born paranormal investigator Nandor Fodor who came to Man, convinced that Gef was not a con trick precisely, but a manifestation of group hysteria. He is played here with commitment and sincerity by Simon Pegg, sporting tailoring and facial hair like a young Sigmund Freud. Writer-director Adam Sigal imagines an assistant for him: Anne, played by Minnie Driver.

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