A look back at Sam Neill's versatile acting career – video obituary

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Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor whose career spanned five decades, has died at the age of 78. From Oscar winners to blockbusters such as The Piano and Jurassic Park, Neill built a career playing dashing romantic leads and charismatic villains across film and television Sam Neill’s 20 best performances A life in pictures ‘A true gentleman’: actors, directors and leaders pay tribute to Sam Neill Obituary Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/HNyWTGn via IFTTT
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Sofonisba’s Chess Game review – pioneering female Renaissance artist gets her due

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Documentary analysis of benchmark 16th-century painting is absorbing but focus on a single work misses the chance to reveal an extraordinary life

Like its predecessors from the Ideas Roadshow series, this essay film looks like a high-grade PowerPoint presentation but shines because of its exceptional subject: the pioneering female Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola and her psychologically luminous portraiture. The film is centred on this queen’s gambit: her c 1555 portrait of her three sisters and housemaid playing chess, which clocked up numerous firsts. Apart from being the first Renaissance all-female group painting and the first to juxtapose women of different classes, its most groundbreaking accomplishment was depicting real-life – rather than symbolic or idealised – women.

Narrated by Elizabeth van Sebelle, the film sticks to basic summaries to relay the context. Born around 1532 into a lapsed aristocratic family from Cremona, as the eldest child Anguissola got a fancy Carthaginian first name (her father was Amilcare) and artistic training a cut above the average woman of the time. Initially schooled by distinguished local painters, she impressed Michelangelo in her early 20s when he challenged her to draw a weeping boy. Her artistic apprenticeship was meant in part to bolster her marriage chances rather than to give her a career in her own right – a career she had, nevertheless, becoming court painter to Philip II of Spain, and subtly influencing her peers.

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