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The ultra-likable comedian decides to go on a chicken shop diet for 28 days, but like a gen-Z Super Size Me uncovers some dark truths behind this billion-dollar industry ‘I think you’re going to die,” says a teenager bluntly to comedian Mo Gilligan when he tells her about his plan to eat only from chicken shops for one month. Spoiler: he lives. But after 84 fried chicken meals, Gilligan is heavier, unhealthier and starting to feel depressed. In this funny, slick and accessible Netflix documentary he takes on “Big Chicken”, the industrialised poultry farming industry. Flavouring doc-journalism with his brand of ultra-likable humour, he’s gen Z’s answer to Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock (who pulled a similar trick 20 years ago, eating nothing but McDonald’s for one month in his 2004 documentary Super Size Me). At the start of the film, there is no guilt in Gilligan’s pleasure walking into a chicken shop (“Bring on the wings!”). Growing up in a low-income household in London, a bucket o...

She’s acting royalty – literally, having played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown – but what questions would you ask her? It is perhaps fitting that Imelda Staunton ended up playing Queen Elizabeth II in the last two series of The Crown, considering she has been acting royalty for years. Her film career has seen her voice champion egg-layer Bunty in 2000’s Chicken Run, followed by roles in Mike Leigh’s 2004 drama Vera Drake and the 2005 comedy Nanny McPhee. In 2014, she played the formidable Welsh miners’ strike campaigner Hefina in Pride . She also plays Lady Maud Bagshaw in the first two Downton Abbey films, and voices Paddington’s beloved Aunt Lucy in all three Paddington films. For a whole generation, however, she will always be Dolores Umbridge in two of the later Harry Potter films, where she somehow made a pink cardigan almost as frightening as Voldemort. On TV, she has cropped up in everything from Little Britain and Doctor Who to Psychoville, Brassic and a memorable guest appear...

This sensitive adaptation of Jansson’s 1972 novel, set in the beatific Gulf of Finland, is a quiet treatise on life and death Glenn Close brings her totemic presence to this gentle movie – as well as a makeup-enhanced grandmotherly face. This is a sweet-natured adaptation of Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel; it has charm, though it’s sometimes becalmed in its own sensitivity. Close plays a tough, wise, humorous-yet-cantankerous eightysomething woman who likes cigarettes and walking around outside stark naked when there’s nobody else around. She brings her recently widowed son (Anders Danielsen Lie) and six-year-old granddaughter Sophia (newcomer Emily Matthews) to a tiny, idyllic island in the Gulf of Finland, where they have a summer cottage. The grandmother may, incidentally, have unresolved feelings for local man Eriksson, in a fleeting cameo for veteran Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurdsson. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/Byd3OvG via IFTTT

How did the pioneering director get involved – then fall out – with the 80s’ poppiest band? How are Sam Peckinpah and Michael Jackson’s Thriller involved? Prepare for a tale of ambition, deception and shuttlecock-stuffed shorts When Wham! squashed Lindsay Anderson’s China film Andrew Ridgeley on Wham’s surreal trip to China It was the evening of 3 April 1985 in a hotel in Hong Kong. Lindsay Anderson, who I’d engaged to direct the theatrical documentary I’d instigated of Wham!’s historic trip to China, had called a meeting of the film crew. He wanted to give a pep talk the night before we flew to Beijing. The 30-strong team my production company had recruited for this adventure duly assembled. Lindsay gave a speech in the stentorian tones of an elder statesman addressing the House of Commons and rooted in Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day oration. And typical Lindsay, he mixed shrewd observation with sardonic wit. “Tomorrow we embark on a great adventure,” he said. “We travel into communist Ch...

Three decades after he channelled his heroin addiction into the cult classic Trainspotting, the Scottish author has discovered the joys of yoga, breathwork and standing desks. But is he quite as ‘Zen’ as he claims? By rights, Irvine Welsh ought to be photographed somewhere gritty, looking grumpy, he says: “That’s the brand.” Beside a graffitied wall or at the docks, with a beanie pulled low, and definitely not smiling. But here he is, clear-skinned and wholesome in shorts and a T-shirt, drinking tea and – it’s hard to think of anything more off-brand – talking about the health benefits of yoga. Given his reputation for having lived in the worlds his books portray, he should or could look a lot worse. He guffaws at this, eyes a delighted blue, and repeats the phrase as if he’s found a new personal tagline: “Could look a lot worse!” Over the three decades since his cult debut, Trainspotting, was published in 1993, Welsh’s fiction has explored with humour the darker side of life. Drugs, c...

Canadian stuntwoman is only 4ft 6in and stood in for star to make the giant Laestrygonians appear even bigger A 35-year-old stuntwoman is one of the great unsung heroes of Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster The Odyssey – standing in for Matt Damon and displaying what the actor called “the greatest arms I’ve ever seen”. Canadian Devyn Dalton was the Hollywood star’s stunt double in a pivotal scene in the film where Odysseus (Damon) and his men are confronted by the Laestrygonians, giant armoured cannibals. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/tgkfJR3 via IFTTT

As AI slop takes over our screens, what better antidote for enquiring minds than a magical film? We ask directors, producers and critics to pick one must-see movie for each year from infancy to early adulthood *** Screentime has a bad rep these days: it’s allegedly at the root of everything from the collapse of media literacy to the rise of the far right. For parents, and indeed anyone who cares about the future of the planet, the relationship children have to their screens is a particular hot potato. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/XZRbHf2 via IFTTT

Long before looksmaxxers, Aziz ‘Zyzz’ Shavershian was famous online for posting workouts and rage-bait – until he died in Thailand in 2011. A new documentary reveals what really happened Decades before the extreme aesthetic trend of looksmaxxing, there was Zyzz. Aziz Shavershian was an Australian teenager who became a fitness influencer in the 2000s, filming his workouts and thoughts about the world on his Nokia and posting them to YouTube. Zyzz was big in all senses of the word: many of his videos would see him flexing into unabashedly vain bodybuilding poses, hair feathered like an anime character, as he mocked his audience’s envy with slang straight out of bodybuilding forums: “U mirin’, brah?” He was skilled in rage-bait long before anyone had heard of it, creating accounts to troll himself in case the haters ever forgot to hate. He started an anonymous Facebook page, titled “10,000 likes and I’ll bash Zyzz”, and, when the goal was reached, switched the page to one advertising his ...

As his 12th feature film, I Want Your Sex, hits theaters, the cult gay film-maker is as fired up as ever Is straight sex the most perverse sex of all? Gregg Araki ’s new film makes a convincing case. Titled I Want Your Sex, the movie is a deliriously fun and often hilarious study of desire, power and art that features bondage, full-frontal and a vagina made out of pink chewed-up bubble gum. “For me, it is a very queer story,” the director says, speaking the week of the film’s release in a video call from his Los Angeles home. “It’s a take on kink and alternate sexuality that goes right across the straight-queer spectrum.” While it is not the first heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki – that honor goes to his 1995 acid trip of a road movie The Doom Generation – it features the new queer cinema pioneer’s starriest cast in years, perhaps in a sign that Hollywood at large has caught up to the cult director’s anarchic vision. Forty years into his career, we still want Araki’s sex: the film is...

Christopher Nolan’s smash hit epic has continued to excite and enrage everyone from rightwingers to academics, an old-fashioned throwback to a uniting big-screen event Peter Bradshaw reviews The Odyssey The Odyssey: jaw-dropping action, dark magic and dolphin cameos – discuss with spoilers Go woke, get rich: why rightwing hate campaigns don’t affect the box office If a high-profile academic is reviewing a movie for the London Review of Books , that movie in question must be making some kind of mark on some kind of culture. And if people are actually reading a movie review in the London Review of Books, and writing thinkpieces in disagreement or favor of said movie or its review, that movie may actually be a cultural phenomenon. Normally, volume of discourse about a movie should not be mistaken for a sign that people are actually seeing it. Sometimes online factions just have a bored fixation not shared by the rest of the world. But Christopher Nolan ’s The Odyssey has some major recei...

The Hacks lead was cast in meta-slasher sensation Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma for her ‘deranged physicality’ – but it’s a fitting role for an actor who has made a point of confronting shame and speaking her mind ‘God is good all the time,” laughs Hannah Einbinder. She’s fresh off a plane from Los Angeles and curled up barefoot in an armchair. This, she says, is “a crazy time in life. Starring in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in the midst of Hacks ending … it’s definitely an embarrassment of riches.” Hacks is the HBO comedy that ended earlier this year; in May, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s queer meta-horror, became the breakout hit of this year’s Cannes film festival. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/EBR5uPv via IFTTT

Makers of unreleased $45m film Fortitude sue after hard drive stolen from streamer’s Los Angeles office Netflix is being sued for $105m over the theft of a hard drive including an unreleased Nicolas Cage war movie. The streamer’s Los Angeles office was the target of a theft involving a number of hard drives, one of which contained a copy of second world war spy thriller Fortitude. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/vdMe9LK via IFTTT

Konrad Wolf’s 1980 drama follows a singer trying to escape the drab compromises of GDR life, capturing the melancholy of thwarted ambition with warmth and wit The terrible sadness, tattiness and poisoned idealism of the old GDR is preserved as if in a time capsule in this East German film from 1980; it could be a kind of B-side to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. The heroine, would-be solo pop singer Sunny, is told by her ungallant MC that she is no Liza Minnelli; Cabaret fans might well incidentally recognise here the brusque German word “bumsen”. Solo Sunny is the work of Konrad “Koni” Wolf, a director with an impressive and strange pedigree: he was a garlanded state-sanctioned artist in East Germany, much admired at the Berlin film festival, whose older brother Markus happened to be one of the highest-ranking officials in the Stasi. It makes Wolf the second most politically compromised German film-maker in history. (The disillusioned communist East German character in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Ka...

Film-maker’s drama Tender Loving Care ‘likely’ his final one as he manages myositis, a disease affecting immune system Film-maker Mike Leigh has said his next film is likely to be his last. According to Indiewire , the Oscar-nominated writer-director was speaking at a recent Golden Globes-hosted roundtable in London about his next film Tender Loving Care, a drama set to premiere during this fall festival season. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/XWEg10C via IFTTT

The duo’s groundbreaking 1985 tour reveals a strange collision of pop stardom and communism, a re-edit of Lindsay Anderson’s efforts that got him fired Here is a documentary that has a very important story to tell, maybe more important than it feels comfortable admitting. It’s about two separate subjects – or maybe three: Wham!, China and film-maker Lindsay Anderson. A superpower nervously edging towards western-style openness, a pop band nervously doing what needed to be done to make it big in the US, and a great film director, needing the money, taking on a project he didn’t really believe in. In 1985, Wham!’s beetle-browed manager Simon Napier-Bell had a cunning plan for how George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley could break the US: Wham! would be the first ever western pop band to perform in mainland China. They would play where the Beatles, the Stones and Elvis had never played, and the resulting global publicity would launch them into the US. (He was right – it did.) In our modern ag...

Netflix documentary A Child of My Own tells the stranger-than-fiction story of a hospital worker who went to extreme lengths in her efforts to become a mother. Its director recounts their meetings in a Mexican prison The CCTV footage of the hospital corridor is grainy but you can make out a young woman carrying an oversized gift bag. Nothing unusual there. Except that inside the bag is a newborn baby girl, just hours old. And the woman carrying the bag, walking out of the hospital’s main entrance, past two security guards who are idly chatting, is not the baby’s mother. Her name is Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza, known to everyone as Alejandra. When film-maker Maite Alberdi met her in a low-security Mexican prison, Alejandra was in the final year of a 13-year jail sentence for snatching the baby. Alberdi listened rapt as Alejandra told her story: “Everything she was telling me was extraordinary, stranger than fiction.” Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/QG...

His mother was an Oscar-winning actor who had been exploited from a young age; Astin appeared in The Goonies at just 13. Now, he has followed in his mother’s footsteps again as a union leader. He talks Stranger Things, AI and why playing Samwise Gamgee cost him his house Sean Astin is showing me around his new office. There’s framed movie prints on the walls, piles of paperwork and a stack of boxes of Stranger Things Funko Pops. “If you were here, you could look out this window and see a 10-storey building with our iconic Sag-Aftra logo on it,” he says proudly on video call, gesturing out of the window to the Los Angeles skyline. “But you just have to trust me that it’s there.” He shows me a framed photo of his mother, Patty Duke, aged 16, with the best supporting actress Oscar she won in 1963 (for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker), and even more proudly, a framed copy of Duke’s business card from when she was president of the Screen Actors Guild in the mid-80s – the role he ...

The hard-working character actor has over 400 screen credits, from The Thing to Platoon to Rick and Morty, and he isn’t slowing down any time soon Keith David’s voice precedes him. Deep and resonant, with mellifluous notes that hark back to his boys’ choir days, it has spent decades inhabiting warriors, gods, rogues, fathers and a welter of cartoon oddballs. Before David appears in a Zoom window from his Los Angeles home office, his voice reverberates through my tinny laptop speakers like a foghorn. “Can you see me now?” he booms once our connection is established after fits and starts. “OK. Outside of technology, you know I’m … OK.” He fizzes about the project he just wrapped: a dark buddy comedy called My Friend Jim, in which he stars opposite Rob Lowe. It’s the latest entry in a seemingly unstinting slew of productions that have kept him booked and busy since the late 1970s, from The Thing to Platoon to There’s Something About Mary to Nope. Continue reading... from Film | The Gua...

As a stunning 4K restoration arrives in theaters, the director and cast reflect on creating the disturbing descent into a criminal underworld Michael Mann has shown time and again in films like Thief , Heat , Miami Vice and Public Enemies that he is one of American film’s greatest explorers of the underworld. “It’s like a kind of cultural anthropology,” Mann tells me from his office in Los Angeles. “If you make films, you get to do that in a different place with a different subject every few years. For me, the exploration is the high.” With its unsettling atmosphere and soaring beauty, Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter reimagined how a thriller could look, sound and feel in an early high point for the director. To commemorate its 40th anniversary Manhunter: The Final Cut , a 4K restoration and director’s cut with three minutes of new footage, will see a theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles this weekend with a nationwide US rollout to follow. Continue reading... from Film | The ...

The film-maker, also behind A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, died on Wednesday in his San Diego home Director Chuck Russell, who helped propel actors such as Jim Carrey , Cameron Diaz and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to the Hollywood A-list, was found dead in his San Diego, California, home on Wednesday. He was 74. Russell directed several box office hits in his decades-long career including A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob and The Mask. In 2002, his film The Scorpion King featured The Rock in his first leading role. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/w2junr8 via IFTTT