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The actor on his fear of pigeons, his dashed boyband hopes, and having a crush on the entire male cast of Neighbours Born in London, Hugh Skinner, 41, trained at Lamda and appeared in the BBC’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 2008. From 2014 to 2017, he played Will in the comedy series W1A; he also appeared in Fleabag and The Windsors. His films include Les Misérables and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. In 2024, he starred in The Importance of Being Earnest at the National Theatre. He reprises the role of Will in Twenty Twenty Six, and stars in the new BBC drama Two Weeks in August. He lives in London. What is your grea test fear? Pigeons. One got stuck in my flat once for quite a long time and it really changed how I feel about them. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/8jAveOL via IFTTT

The comedy legend, who adopted his silent persona because of stage nerves, did occasionally address his audience, as revealed by a new archive release Groucho was the cigar-chomping wit with the improbable moustache, Chico was the piano-playing rustic grifter and Zeppo played the straight man and the lover. But as any Marx Brothers fan knows, Harpo was the pantomime, who cracked up the audience without saying a word, dressed in his tattered raincoat and curly wig. His persona was childlike and mischievous but also musical – he let his harp and his taxi horn do the talking. But now we get to see, or rather hear, a new side to Harpo Marx. A very special recording has been unearthed of Harpo in 1964 speaking to an audience, in character. Arthur “Harpo” Marx was born Adolph Marx in New York in 1888. He started performing with his brothers in 1910, and his nickname probably came about because of his instrument of choice – he was an entirely self-taught musician. By 1915, due to his nerves a...

The comedian makes an unconvincing bid for movie stardom in a largely unfunny and old-fashioned feature-length sitcom episode The popular standup comedian Nate Bargatze uses his appealingly deadpan demeanor to convey relatable, family-friendly jokes about his own middle-class doofiness. Funny as he can be, his affect doesn’t seem ideal for performing with others. Back in the 90s, an American sitcom would have been built around him anyway; today, the form isn’t quite so ubiquitous, and sold-out standup tickets have remained his bread and butter. Yet Bargatze has done surprisingly well as a two-time Saturday Night Live host, especially for more writerly pieces that other celebrities might not so perfectly underplay. For his film debut The Breadwinner, Bargatze takes cues from an earlier SNL player – specifically and unfortunately, the suburban dregs of Adam Sandler’s late-2000s/early-2010s middle period. As in vaguely sour-spirited Sandler vehicles like Grown Ups or Jack & Jill, Barg...

Fairyland is a bittersweet film about a girl brought up by her gay father in a blizzard of glitter and feather boas in 1970s San Francisco. Its makers discuss its resonance, its tragedies – and their own boho childhoods When Sofia Coppola logs on to our video call, her friend and fellow film-maker Andrew Durham – whose directorial debut, Fairyland , she has produced – is telling me about being nine or 10 years old, and accidentally outing his father as gay. “Have you heard this story, Sofia?” he asks breezily from Los Angeles. “About Pietro? The Italian guy that my dad was maybe having an affair with when we lived in England?” At home in New York, Coppola furrows her brow. “Uh, yeah. A long time ago, I think. I forgot …” Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/UyASfjW via IFTTT

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

Martel’s documentary about the shooting of Javier Chocobar is a mannered and dignified work, laden with post-colonial tension and the weight of institutions The great doyenne of Argentine cinema, writer-director Lucrecia Martel (La Ciénaga, The Holy Girl, The Headless Woman), ventures into documentary to cover a murder trial, the issues of which spill out into very Martelian areas of concern: land and terrain as an active force in people’s lives, the tension between Indigenous people and the descendants of colonists, the legacy of weighty institutions (the law, the church) on everyday people. Like Martel’s fictional features, Landmarks unfolds in stately fashion, and features the sort of editing that lingers on the face of a speaker holding forth, or follows a cleaner polishing furniture and a clerk distributing dainty cups of coffee to the authorities as the arguments drag on. Martel explores the more poetic side of drone technology, giving the viewer a very clear understanding of the...

Underwater beastie shows discerning moral judgment when picking off victims in this fun Norwegian action film As Greta Thunberg demonstrates, an eco-chastising feels somehow cleansing when it comes out of Scandinavia. Maybe it’s because of the idea that people there live in greater harmony with nature. It is splendidly showcased in the shape of Norway’s Sognefjord, the country’s largest fjord, in this didactic but still-enjoyable action film. Kraken could almost serve as an extended tourist promo – other than the titular beastie that is, slewing off giant crab-like lice, and emerging from the depths to administer a stern 90-minute ticking-off about tampering with nature. Marine researcher Johanne (Sara Khorami, cementing her Norwegian creature-feature credentials after Troll 2 ) is summoned to the Sognefjord after reports of mass salmon strandings. Her first port of call is the local fish farm run by Erik (Mikkel Bratt Silset), an old flame with whom she developed sonic delousing pods ...

Emma Thompson among voices supporting anti-ageism campaign, which has uncovered striking findings in top-grossing UK films over past three years Box office hit films are four times more likely to star a talking animal than a woman over 60, according to a new survey by Age Without Limits. The anti-ageism campaign studied the 100 highest performing films released in the UK in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and found that while five starred an older woman, about 20 featured creatures who chat. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/MQspqIX via IFTTT

Film about a couple on trial for child abuse isn’t a patch on the director’s previous Palme winner, while other disappointing films seemed to grab the jury’s attention These were the prizes for a Cannes under pressure. The Hollywood A-listers and big-hitters were A-listing and big-hitting at home this year. And what about the international heavyweights from Europe and Asia that highbrow festivaliers are always saying are loads better than the Americans anyway? Well, many of those only showed up in the physical sense. For me, most of the films from the accepted laureates and auteurs were very moderate, and I have to confess being sceptical about this year’s Palme d’Or, Fjord , by Romanian film-maker Cristian Mungiu (who won the Palme nearly 20 years ago with his searing abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). Fjord is, in fact, a perfect example of an established European star director using a big Hollywood name: Sebastian Stan, playing a grumpy and religious Romanian IT engineer,...

English-language debut by Romanian director who triumphed in 2007 with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days takes top prize Nineteen years after his searing abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the top prize at the Cannes film festival, Cristian Mungiu’s English-language debut, Fjord , has repeated the trick. The film – which stars Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan as Romanian religious parents who relocate to Norway, where they find themselves accused of child abuse – makes Mungiu, 58, the 10th director to have received two Palmes, following Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Bille August, Emir Kusturica, Shōhei Imamura, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, Ken Loach and Ruben Östlund. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/gwJAmen via IFTTT

Emerald Fennell says period-realistic scene emphasising Cathy’s lack of razors was shot but did not make final cut The Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell said it was “unfortunate” that a scene showing Margot Robbie’s hairy armpits did not make the final cut, because women in period adaptations are often shown with clean-shaven underarms. Robbie’s character, Cathy, had “extremely hairy armpits” in the 2026 adaptation of the novel, but “unfortunately the scene that we see them didn’t make it in there”, said the director. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/jG9YsKF via IFTTT

Cannes film festival: This could be better paced but the crisis which descends on an up-against-it dairy farm is delivered by some very memorable goons There’s nothing like a home-invasion suspense thriller to provide a change of pace in the Cannes competition, and Léa Mysius’s film – adapted from the French bestseller Histoires de la Nuit by Laurent Mauvignier – isn’t at all bad, although it runs out of narrative steam in the third act and one particular shock-twist appears to unshock and untwist itself. Yet the film certainly delivers some sinister rural strangeness in the France profonde countryside and some gonzo shootouts; plus there is a ripe turn from Benoît Magimel, who with every film seems to morph further into a cross between Gérard Depardieu and Christopher Walken. In a very remote bucolic village, Thomas (Bastien Bouillon) is a hardworking dairy farmer who took over the family smallholding after his father killed himself. After a whirlwind romance, he married Nora (Ha...

A demonic entity attaches itself to travellers on the road in this competently directed but hopelessly indistinctive scare-free misfire As Obsession , a micro-budget horror made by a YouTuber , continues to overperform with critics and audiences, and as another twentysomething content creator prepares to break a potential record with the release of Backrooms , here comes a stodgy by-the-book Paramount horror that feels like someone’s embarrassing dad just gatecrashed a college party. While others might be trying to innovate, those involved with Paramount’s generic schedule-filler Passenger are perfectly content to keep things lazily trucking along as they always have. Even if it wasn’t stuck in an unfortunate gen Z genre sandwich, it would still be a struggle to see why anyone would want to hitch a ride with this one. Like February’s cursed misfire Psycho Killer , another junky on-the-road studio horror, Passenger plays like something that would have gone straight to unrated DVD back ...

The giant of stage and screen is 87 and still hates looking in the mirror. At home with his husband, he talks about weeping, sleeping with Daniel Craig, terrifying directors and the joys of white wine and a nap Derek Jacobi is chatting to the photographer in the living room. His voice is unmistakeable – rich, buttered, every sentence beautifully parsed and phrased. I’m in the kitchen with his husband, Richard Clifford, who is making coffee. He tells me they have been together 47 years. “We met when I was 22 and he was 39.” “I’m a child snatcher,” guffaws Jacobi from the lounge. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/tTgjEs0 via IFTTT

Underground doors and regression therapy – it sounds like a can’t miss for the genre, but the knockout blow is never delivered Though it features few recognisable faces, this Australian-shot, US-set indie horror displays a core competency that gets it some of the way to where it’s heading – only to collapse in the final reels into the usual hacky manoeuvres. Ten years after fleeing a fundamentalist branch of the Latter-day Saints, snub-nosed artist heroine Elise (Elizabeth Cullen) has started shunning the attentions of boyfriend Adam (John Kim), instead obsessively digging holes in the couple’s back garden and trashing the living room in the middle of the night. Could it have something to do with the grimy cellar door she feels compelled to paint, or the traumatic baptism we witness in a pre-title sequence? What are the chances? For somewhere between half and two-thirds of its running time, we’re watching a diagnostic case study: Elise and close pals return to Mormon country – more spe...

Cannes film festival: Sachs’ film about an HIV-positive actor in the homophobic Reagan-era 80s is well-intended, but Malek’s mannered performance is hard to love This film from writer-director Ira Sachs gives us premium-strength, undiluted Rami Malek – but I have to say that his overripe performance and self-conscious mannerisms here are perhaps even more oppressively insistent for being conveyed relatively quietly in spoken dialogue. And not quietly at all in the singing scenes. Malek is a performer whose style is as distinctive as those of John Malkovich or Jeff Goldblum. But it works best with a light touch in the direction and material. Things never really come together here. The Man I Love is a film about gay culture in 1980s New York, at the height of the reactionary homophobia of Reagan’s America, with HIV-positive men coming to terms with their condition and with the callous bigotry of the political zeitgeist. In one hospital scene, we see the authorities’ icily unsympathetic ...

The online era is pushing screen romantics to alarming extremes. Whether posing as a stranger’s fiancee or framing someone as an obsessive stalker, happy endings look harder than ever to find It’s a long-running romcom trope that the couples we’re supposed to root for are often hiding lies that threaten the chances of any happy relationship blossoming. From classics such as The Shop Around the Corner to modern blockbusters such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, the genre thrives whenever it presents the audience with the most alarming red flags it conceals from its characters, raising the stakes by seeing if sparks can still fly when an ulterior motive behind each meet-cute is hidden in plain sight. In the romantic comedies we’ve seen so far this year, this trope has not only been revived but pushed far beyond its breaking point, cementing a new romcom archetype: the unlucky-in-love sociopath. This week’s new release Finding Emily is the starkest example to date, introducing psychology...

The director of Drive, unveiling new thriller My Private Hell, told journalists he ‘died for 25 minutes’ in 2023 The Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn , best known for films such as the Pusher trilogy and Drive, has emotionally spoken about his near-death experience and heart surgery three years ago. The director, whose first film in 10 years, Her Private Hell , premiered on Monday evening, told gathered journalists that he had “died for 25 minutes” in 2023. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/HPzYCEo via IFTTT

Cannes film festival: Spaniard’s latest life-v-art auto-metafiction feels slightly muddled as he directs a director directing a director With its rich, warm, summery colours, nothing could surely be less bitter or less Christmassy than this film. It’s the latest from Cannes competition regular Pedro Almodóvar, partly set during Christmas; the female lead actually complains about the yuletide traffic at one stage. But there’s no tinsel or sleigh bells or shopping for presents. Like Die Hard, it eludes classification. It is another – which is to say, yet another – double-layered creation by Almodóvar, a kind of movie auto-metafiction of the sort that he has virtually invented, a life-v-art dialectical process that he is evidently unable to do without. Like the recent Pain and Glory , Bitter Christmas is a candidly personal movie, circling around ideas like grief, loss, the vampirism of art and the betrayal involved in basing fictional characters on real people. Perhaps by emphasising thi...

Interviews and archive material are elegantly stitched together in this look at a huge student uprising in 1969 Quebec If someone mentions race riots and student protests in the 1960s and 70s, chances are that would mean, to most people, civil rights protests in the American south, sit-ins in California or the National Guard opening fire on students at Kent State University in Ohio. But revolution and resistance were ideas that crossed borders and seeded outbreaks all over the world, and supposedly friendly, polite countries such as Canada had no special immunity. This elegantly crafted documentary, directed by Michèle Stephenson, recounts a charged moment in Quebec history in 1969 when black students at Sir George Williams University, now called Concordia University, staged what would become the biggest campus protest in Canadian history; it resulted in scores of arrests and about C$2m in property damage due to fire destroying a computer lab. Interviews with several of the protest’s k...